


the time has come (let us be brave)

by misandrywitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-07 12:46:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 44,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Lily places a bet, does some investigating, gets in a fight, fixes a broken nose and learns a few things about her friends, that idiot James Potter, and herself. Three very complicated weeks towards the end of the year, because that's the only time anything actually happens at Hogwarts right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Friday

**Author's Note:**

> i'm aware that the timeline of this fic doesn't line up with canon, and i have very simply elected not to care (marlene is definitely attacked earlier than she is in this, and the prank happened before snape's worst memory in canon and i've written it as happening a year later). i'm sure someone will comment so there you go-- canon, what's canon?
> 
> shittybknights.tumblr.com

June 1976

It all starts with a bet.

If she really thought about it, Lily Evans would probably say that it started when she stepped off the Hogwarts Express at the age of 11 and met the two dark-haired, wicked-eyed boys who would become known as "Black and Potter," or alternatively "The biggest berks I've ever met." But in her mind, the series of very strange events that heralded the last few weeks of her sixth year at Hogwarts would never have happened as they did if she hadn't placed the stupid bet with Sirius Black. And the bet begins one lovely, sun-drenched Friday afternoon.

It's double Charms with the Hufflepuffs, which is usually a good thing. Lily admires Professor Flitwick, and is generally pretty good at Charms. She, Dorcas Meadowes and Mary McDonald typically make a point of sticking together (being the three most sensible Gryffindor sixth-year girls, in Lily's opinion), but this particular day they are joined by Alice Fortescue. in their year in Hufflepuff. The class is still struggling its way through using non-verbal spells, which Lily finds to be particularly difficult, and they're supposed to be charming goblets filled with vinegar to wine without using any words. Mary, looking very pleased with herself, has already managed it. Lily can't do non-verbal spells well without a great deal of concentration, and she can't concentrate because of two sniggering voices sitting a few rows back from her.

She isn't alone.

"Mister Black!" Professor Flitwick has apparently had enough as well, unusual for him. He's usually quite accommodating of chatter in his classes, but today his eyes are narrowed. "If you don't mind keeping your voice down—your wine looks excellent, by the way, I don't know how you managed to turn it into a nice Chianti like that though I must applaud you on it. But the rest of this class is trying very hard to accomplish this and they probably find it very difficult to manage anything expensive with you carrying on as you do. If something is that important that you and Mister Potter must discuss it right now, you can tell the whole class."

Sirius Black, long dark hair, aristocratic bone structure, flashing grey eyes, smirks.

"Nothing so terribly important, professor," he starts and Lily rolls her eyes, preparing herself for the oncoming wave of bullshit. "I'm just in a really brilliant mood. Though of course it's hard not to, seeing dulcet tones and rather enviable whiskers for two solid hours on a Friday afternoon!"

He has the rest of the class's attention and he knows it. He grins. James Potter grins. Even Dorcas snorts, then tries to cover it up with a cough. Flitwick sighs good-humouredly. He seems to know what is coming.

"What on earth could make you happier than that?" he says.

"Well," Black shrugs nonchalantly. "I had sausages for breakfast, it's a beautiful sunny day and my afternoon is stretching wide and free in front of me—"

"With the exception of the essay I'm assigning you for homework, I hope," Flitwick interjects.

"Of course! Of course. And once I finish it, I plan to frolic across the lawn and tickle the giant squid. I've got a box of extra dark chocolate from Honeydukes hiding under my bed, a pretty great prank to plan, the last Quidditch match of the year on the horizon and maybe most importantly Professor, I've just started a new relationship and I'm really cheerful about it!"

"Be that as it may, please kindly refrain from discussing the particulars of your love life in my class, Mister Black." Sirius winks. "Mister Pettigrew, do not drink from that goblet! I assure you it will be quite disappointing. Back to work!"

And the class resumes order.

Black is right about one thing—it is a beautiful afternoon. Lily manages to successfully changes her vinegar to a passable Chardonnay, stays to help Flitwick clear up and then heads out onto the Hogwarts front lawn to meet Mary, Dorcas, Alice and Amelia Bones under their usual sun-dappled spot on the grass. They're stretched out underneath a tree and Lily joins them, slinging her bag off her shoulder and sitting down in the cool grass. It's May, just warm enough for Lily to want to kick off her shoes and tie her hair out of her face, and not a cloud in sight. Lily is preparing to close her eyes and enjoy the sun when Mary brings it up.

"So who's Sirius Black dating, then?" she asks, blonde hair spilling over her arms, which are crossed under her head.

"Who cares," Lily mutters.

"No, it is a fair question," Alice, brown bob, warm brown eyes and dimples, agrees. "Usually he brags about it, you know? Wants everyone to know who he's messing about with. And he has been all cheerful lately but he hasn't said anything."

"Hasn't hexed Snape in a solid week, it feels like," Amelia, who has dark curls and sensible glasses and a perfect hourglass figure, adds.

"Both of them deserve to get hexed," Lily is not in the mood to discuss Black or Snape right now. "And any girl willing to date Sirius Black's missing half a brain to begin with."

"He's not so bad," Dorcas argues.

All four girls look sharply up at her.

"And it isn't me!" Dorcas protests. "That was one kiss, and it was fourth year and I was very ill informed, thanks."

"It's someone, you're right Mary," Amelia agrees contemplatively. "He's acting far too happy considering that Gryffindor is playing Slytherin for the Cup next week. Usually he's all on edge."

"He's not because he knows, like I know, that we're gonna win!" Mary says.

"Hm," Amelia says. She's in Ravenclaw and while she doesn't play Quidditch herself, her brother does and her loyalty is first and foremost to him. Ravenclaw came very close to beating Gryffindor but lost spectacularly a few weeks ago. Amelia is still bitter about it. Poor Alice, in Hufflepuff, has been out of the running for ages.

Luckily, loud shouting and splashing from the lake interrupt what probably would have been a pretty nasty argument. Peter Pettigrew and Sirius are leaping around in the lake, trousers rolled up over their knees. One of the giant squid's tentacles is waving lazily in the air, splashing water at them as they bellow and shout and shove each other. James is lying on his stomach underneath a nearby tree, the one the four Gryffindor boys usually claim during the spring months. His shirtsleeves are rolled up over his elbows and he's making notes on a roll of parchment; probably Quiddich plans and not an essay, Lily thinks. Remus Lupin is stretched out on the grass next to him with his book bag under his head, his eyes closed.

"You would have to be mad though," Alice says.

"So it's got to be someone he's not keen to show off!" Mary says.

"I feel like one of us would have noticed something, don't you?" Alice says. "Frank hasn't mentioned anything to me, and they're pretty good mates."

"Maybe she goes to another school?" Mary suggests. They watch Sirius dance backwards out of the water and towards the tree where his friends are sitting.

"Maybe someone Muggleborn?" Dorcas asks. "And he doesn't want his family or his brother to find out so he's been really secretive about it?"

Mary claps her hands. "Forbidden romance!" she cackles.

"I don't know if he's got the depth," Amelia says.

"He does. He just hides it well," Dorcas argues.

"Oh honestly," Lily snaps. "If you're so interested, why don't you just ask him yourself?"

"Maybe I will," Mary says. "If I can't figure it out first."

"SIRIUS BLACK IF YOU DRIP ON MY BOOKS I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU LOVE," Remus bellows suddenly from the lake, and Sirius dashes away up the lawn cackling madly, water flying out of his hair.

"Ugh," Lily says.


	2. Sunday

The subject doesn't come up again for the rest of the weekend, which Lily spends alternatively plowing through 4 essays and shouting at anyone who makes too much noise in the library. They are all busy enough that Lily hopes the entire topic will get dropped altogether; she gets really tired very quickly of idle gossip, especially when it has something to do with Black and Potter, which it usually does.

But she comes down to dinner that Sunday to sit next to Mary, who is deep in conversation with James about the upcoming Quiddich match, which will seal the Inter-House championship.

"Longbottom just has to remember not to catch the Snitch until we are fifty points up from Slytherin. Otherwise, we won't have enough points to win the Cup."

"I know, Potter, I know," Mary is saying. James, unsurprisingly, has been manic about the match and seems to spend a good deal of his time (when he's not harassing Lily) coming up winning strategies and leaping out of closets and from around corners to quiz his players about his plans. "That's where you, me and Weasley come in, and you know we're the best Chasers at this school right now."

"As long as we remember that, the Cup will be ours!" James crows, driving his enthusiasm home by waving his hands enthusiastically in front of Mary's face. "They won't have a chance. They aren't as fast as we are, they don't have a Seeker as good as Longbottom and their Beaters aren't composed of a flying mountain on a broom and a fearless madman."

"No chance," Mary says smugly. "I can't wait to see the look on their smarmy faces."

"Especially Snape's smarmy face!" James agrees, then starts when he noticed Lily has joined them. He looks rather uncomfortable, coughs, then covers it up by making a big show of grinning and handing her the pumpkin juice. He never used to have any qualms about insulting Snape in front of her, Lily thinks, but now he does. It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that she doesn't talk to Severus anymore. Something happened, something bad, at the beginning of the school year, and now the four Gryffindor boys seem to simply avoid him whenever possible, rather than purposefully antagonize him. They all tiptoed around Remus too, for a few weeks, and he wouldn't tell Lily what was wrong. It seems to have blown over now, whatever it was, but she's still a little curious.

"I'd like tea, actually," Lily says, brushing James's hand away.

"You coming to the match, Evans?" He's undeterred.

"Well, Mary will be playing in it, won't she?"

"Well, of course. She's a great Chaser, you know. We're the best bloody team in this school right now! No way we won't win."

"Doubt it, if you keep on like that," a voice from behind them. Sirius slides into the seat across from James, Remus and Peter at his heels, and starts piling food onto his plate. "Your head'll get so big that you won't be able to get your broom off the ground and I'll have to cart you around on mine." James gestures rudely towards him, laughing. "MacDonald, Evans. You're both looking ravishing this evening," Sirius says.

"Oh, knock it off," Remus says cheerfully. Sirius leans across the table and steals his dinner roll. In retaliation, Remus jabs his fork into a piece of Sirius's steak and shoves it into his mouth, raising his eyebrows in defiance. Sirius snatches the fork right out of Remus's mouth and flings it down the table, where it clatters into someone's bowl of soup. Both boys freeze, then burst into laughter.

"The Cup is ours this year," Peter says. "Makes up for us losing the House Cup."

"Obviously," James winks. If Lily keeps rolling her eyes, she is going to be stuck cross-eyed.

"We wouldn't be losing the House Cup if you lot hadn't decided to turn one of the dungeons into a swamp last month," she says.

"But it was a brilliant swamp," Peter says. "Filch mopped it up for a week."

"Talking about the match?" Dorcas sits down next to Lily, flipping her dark braid over her shoulder. There is something about these four boys that attracts people and onlookers, so they are in the middle of the table and the seats surrounding them are crammed. Lily usually tries to avoid the whole situation, but her options are to sit with Mary and Dorcas in the middle of the table or sit by herself at the end.

Mary's got a pretty level head on her shoulders; she's smart and bold and energetic, but also practical and thorough. Dorcas is a bit more fanciful, but she's quieter and usually isn't impressed by flashy magic (Divination and then Potions being her best subjects). And yet they both get caught up in the hijinks of these four boys. Even Lily's friends outside of her House, the ones that don't possess typical Gryffindor sensibilities and therefore aren't impressed by irritating feats of daring and explosions and grand gestures, do. Lily has never understood it, and she doesn't understand it now. She likes Remus quite a lot; they are both Prefects and study together quite often. He is the most collected person Lily has ever met—and at the moment he is howling with laughter with both of his hands (lined with pale white scars) over his face as Sirius attempts to levitate the fork back down the table and drops it right into Kingsley Shacklebolt's glass of pumpkin juice. Lily has nothing in common with Peter Pettigrew, though he seems a nice enough boy most of the time, if just incredibly boy-like. Black she finds excessive; too loud, too handsome, too clever, too aware of all of these facts. And Potter…

Well. Lily's life would be a whole lot easier if he wasn't also handsome.

"Yes ma'am," James says agreeably.

"Good week then!" Dorcas says. "The match Wednesday, Hogsmede trip over the weekend, then one more week of classes before exams."

"Excellent!" Sirius has retrieved his fork. "I'm almost out of Dungbombs, which is a real shame. Used up most of them when I was levitating them into Moaning Myrtle's bathroom last week, did you hear? Filch was livid."

"Murderous," Peter agrees.

"Putrescent with rage," Remus says. "He got all quivery and shakey—it was very frightening."

"Any plans for Hogsmede then, Red?" James says.

"Don't call me that," Lily says, spearing broccoli on her fork. "Not even my dad calls me that, honestly. You sound like you jumped out of a bad film."

"So that's a no, then. Luckily for you, I don't either! What do you say—Hogsmede with me?"

Lily turns and meets his eyes, which are very blue and twinkling and confident and also—hopeful? Lily is pretty sure he only asks her out because she's completely uninterested in him, that he doesn't actually have any real intentions towards her. She's pretty sure. She scoffs, to cover up any doubt.

"In your dreams, Potter," she says.

James grins cheekily. "A day with you in Hogsmede—you are describing my dreams Evans, how did you know? That and winning the Quiddich World Cup one day and maybe becoming Head Boy because it would please my Mum—that's all I want."

"Out of the three of those, you're much more likely to become Head Boy," Lily says. "And you got detention last week for charming Hagrid's chickens to breathe fire."

"So if I become Head Boy, you'll go to Hogsmede with me?" James says.

"Maybe," Lily eats more broccoli, ending the conversation.

"Anyone else got a date to Hogsmede then?" Mary asks. "Other than Alice, of course."

"I do," Peter says, shyly and Sirius slaps him on the shoulder and whistles. "And again, I'm not telling you who she is because I know you'll just heckle her. I don't want her to end up with spots on her face that read 'Peter's bit' or something."

"Smart lad," Dorcas says.

"Wouldn't dream of it!" James looks affronted.

"Not a bad idea though," Sirius says, and they laugh.

"But no one else? Sirius? Didn't you say you've got a new girlfriend?" Mary's like a dog with a bit of old steak.

"New relationship, yup,"Sirius says.

"Not taking her to Hogsmede?"

"Nah, don't think so," Sirius shrugs. "Got more important things to do than prove anything to you lot, don't I? Got a prank to plan, involving the Slytherin's dinner on Saturday. Exactly what you think it is!"

"But who is she?" Dorcas is leaning forward now, interested. Behind them, Peter and James cackle together.

"Why do you want to know?" Sirius smirks. "Got a little crush, Dorcas? Too bad—I'm saving myself for McGonagall."

"No," Dorcas snaps. "Just curious."

"And you too, Mary? You curious?"

Mary shrugs. "Well, sure."

"And Evans? Tell me you're not a little intrigued."

"Mostly want to find the girl so I can warn her," Lily says.

"Cause I've got a brilliant idea," Sirius says. "Now that I've got your interest, it'll be no fun if I just tell you. We bet on it. 10 galleons to you three if you can guess it by, say, the end of the school year. Gives you three weeks. 10 galleons to me if you can't guess it!"

"What if this person doesn't want you to guess it?" Peter asks, concerned.

"You'll never guess it," James adds, helpfully.

"I'm pretty sure they're fine with it," Remus says. "I bet they'll think it's funny."

"You're on," Mary says automatically. She's competitive. "James, you know who it is right? You can moderate. But you've got to give us some hints. Dorcas?"

"Okay, sure,"Dorcas agrees.

"Evans?" James waggles his eyebrows at her.

"Absolutely not," Lily says. "You could be dating Nearly Headless Nick for all I care, Black. Cause I don't care."

"It's not Nearly Headless Nick," Peter says.

"Come on, Lily," Sirius plants both his hands on the table and leans towards her. No one has ever been able to deny that he looks good while smirking. Lily suspects he does it in front of a mirror. She frowns back at him. "A little flutter never hurt anyone. Mary and Dorcas are into it. Or are you afraid I'll beat you."

"You never beat me," Lily snaps.

"I beat you in Defense last year," Sirius says. "And on our last Charms exam."

"By one point!" Lily says furiously.

"And I didn't even study," Sirius finishes.

And that's enough. Lily reaches into her pocket and smacks a 10-galleon piece into Sirius's palm. "Fine," she hisses. Dorcas and Mary are staring at her, and so are James and Peter. Remus, at across from Sirius, mildly eats the last piece of his roast. "You're on. Last day of school, I'll have it."

"What if you break up between now and then?" Dorcas suggests. Remus coughs on his roast, and Sirius leans over to pound enthusiastically him on the back.

"They won't break up," Peter pipes up. "They're pretty, uh, serious. Absolutely no pun intended, Merlin's pants."

"This is a long time coming, you could say," Remus adds, once he's got his breath back. "Some of us have been waiting for it for quite some time." James and Peter both clutch each other in their mirth.

"And your hints," Sirius digs in his own pockets and pulls out a 10 galleon piece, which he shows to Lily. "Okay. You get three. First—it's someone who goes, or has gone, to Hogwarts. So nobody from another school or anything. Second—it's someone all three of you know relatively well."

"So it's not some nobody in Ravenclaw that nobody ever talks to?" Dorcas says.

"Well, could be in Ravenclaw—not giving that away. But you know them. And finally—it's someone pretty out of the ordinary. Not somebody you'd expect."

"Not at all," Peter grins.

"Not even a little," adds James.

"Fine," Lily says again, already regretting her choice. And then shake on it.


	3. Sunday Evening

"What we've got to do," Amelia says "is narrow down our options." She's the kind of Ravenclaw who likes lists, and charts, and bullet points. She isn't technically involved in the bet, but she can't pass up an opportunity to organize the girls of Hogwarts into a list. The tip of her quill is hovering impatiently over her parchment.

"I think it'll be easier if we start with all the girls who it could not be and go from there," Dorcas adds.

"You're making it sound like Black's gotten with every girl in the school! I don't know if he's gotten with any, honestly."

"He hasn't," Dorcas says. "But he could, if he wanted. That's the problem. There aren't many girls who wouldn't date him."

"I wouldn't date him," Lily says adamantly.

Alice shrugs. "I would, if just to find out if what I've heard about him is true."

"It's true," Dorcas giggles. "He's a great kisser."

"Not exactly what I meant," Alice says. "You know what they say about pureblood boys."

"That they're inbred?"

"Not exactly."

"Well, I can confirm it's true about Frank…" Alice winks.

"Wonder if that holds true with Potter too," Mary muses, and Dorcas, who has always gone a little gooey where James Potter is concerned, giggles.

"Oh for God's… well it's none of us," Lily is determined to get this over and done with as soon as she can to prevent any further conversation about what exactly is good about pureblood boys. Nothing, from her point of view. Occasionally they have nice hair. And rather fit calves. But that's it. Lily smacks herself in the forehead.

"And it's not anyone from my dorm, I'm almost positive. I'll check though," Alice says. "And I'll ask Frank, to see if he knows."

"Yeah, do that." Amelia chews on the end of her quill. "And no way is it Mafalda, she'd have blabbed if it was." Mafalda Hopkirk, 6th year Hufflepuff, notorious for her big mouth. "And it's not Lucinda Talkalot. And probably not Emmeline Vance either." She moves to add the names to her list but Lily grabs her hand.

"No, wait," she says. "It's someone out of the ordinary."

"Emmeline is really pretty," Dorcas says.

"But Emmeline's in Slytherin. We can rule them out, I think," Mary is perched on the end of her bed, Dorcas next to her with her arms crossed on the bedpost. Amelia is sitting at Lily's desk and Alice with Lily on her bed. The other two girls in their room aren't in, and so can't complain about non-Gryffindor girls hanging around.

"It is someone out of the ordinary though," Alice points out.

Mary shakes her head, long blonde hair catching torchlight. "It's one thing to be out of the ordinary and another to be completely and totally out of character. If we were guessing someone else, like Lupin or Lovegood or someone, I'd say maybe—not everyone in Slytherin hangs out with that horrible lot of—you know—" she trails off, looking at Lily.

"It's okay," Lily says. "Snape's lot, just say it. I've accepted it's not going to change."

"Right, Snape's lot."

"Easier if you were still talking to him," Amelia says. "He'd probably know."

"I'll ask Emmeline," Lily says. "She's was prefect with me last year, I know her well enough. Dorcas, you and I will ask the rest of the Gryffindors. Mary, you ask the other people on the Quiddich team to see if they know anything. Otherwise we've got to just keep an eye on him to see who he talks to that's any different than usual. Sirius Black isn't the most subtle of people, this isn't going to be that difficult." She stands and makes to head out of their room.

"You're awfully determined about this," Dorcas laughs.

"I don't want him to beat me," Lily says. "Not over something stupid."

"Him being Black? Or Potter?"

"Mary, just shut up," Lily snaps, and storms out of the dorm.

The whole situation is nagging at her, so Lily decides to get it out of the way as soon as she can. She goes in search of Emmeline Vance, who she finds in the library. She was a prefect last year when Lily became one, and now she's Head Girl. She's a very unlikely person for Sirius Black to be dating, but Lily supposes that's the point.

Emmeline is tall and slender, with dark hair and strong, full brows. She's in Slytherin, but she's never hung around with Malfoy, any of the Blacks, Avery, Mulciber or Snape. She wants to be an Auror. She's hunched over a textbook, undoubtedly studying for NEWTS that begin next week, when Lily approaches her table, but she glances up when she hears footsteps.

"Lily, hi," she says. Emmeline has some of aristocratic beauty that Narcissa Malfoy and, one could argue, Sirius, possess, but none one of the attitude. "How are you?"

"Fine," Lily says. "I've got a bit of an odd question."

Emmeline stretches, her back pops. "I need a break anyway. Avoid the Magical Theory NEWT, when you get there. Go right ahead."

"You aren't dating Sirius Black, by any chance?" Lily decides to just bite the bullet on this one. Emmeline stares at her.

"No," she says slowly. "No, definitely not."

"You, um, you sure?"

"Lily," Emmeline is looking at her very seriously down her long nose. "If I was even interested in Sirius Black, which I am absolutely not, I would never date him for the simple fact that I'd probably get cursed in my bed by certain members of my House. Anyway, I don't like pretty boys."

Lily clears her throat, feeling very silly. "You don't know who is, by any chance?"

"I try not to pay much attention to anything Sirius Black is doing that doesn't involve breaking school rules," Emmeline says. "It's a good general principle to adopt with the whole damn family, I think. Why on earth are you asking?"

"I've got a bet on with him that I can guess who it is by the end of the year," Lily admits. "It's stupid, I know, I'm a bit annoyed I agreed to it now."

"Gryffindors," Emmeline shakes her head.

"I just want to beat him!" Lily says. "He shouldn't get to win at everything, even if it's stupid."

Emmeline considers her for a long moment, playing with the end of her braid. "I'll ask around," she says finally. "I don't think it's anyone in my House, but I can check if you like. He is a bit of a bastard, isn't he?"

"Yeah," Lily says. "Thanks." And she leaves the library feeling significantly more cheerful and heads back to the dorm, where she and Alice play a very close game of Exploding Snap. Mary comes in after a few minutes and joins them.

"Black snuck out of the common room about a half an hour ago, right when I came downstairs," she says. "So I followed him, all the way outside and behind the greenhouses. I was sure I was going to catch him right away—that's where everyone goes to make out, you know? But he noticed me and just went 'Bloddy hell MacDonald, can't a guy have a cigarette in peace?'" She flings her head of gold hair. "So I hid around the corner for a while but all he did was smoke and then head back inside. Frankly a waste of time."

"Maybe a little subtlety might be in order," Alice laughs.

Frank Longbottom, who's in his last year at and also beginning to study for NEWTS, cheers Alice on as she loses to Lily, and then admits he's got no idea either.

"I thought you might because you play Quidditch with him," Alice says. Frank shrugs.

"I mean, we're mates. We get along fine. He just doesn't exactly tell me his deepest, darkest secrets, you know?"

"Damn," Lily says. She glances over towards Peter, James, Sirius and Remus, who are sitting in a circle in the corner of the common room they claimed as theirs way back in first year. James is reading a battered copy of Quidditch Through the Ages and Sirius is sketching something on a roll of parchment; he keeps frowning and scribbling lines out with a Muggle ballpoint pen. Peter and Remus are concentrating on a game of Wizard's chess, which it looks like Remus is solidly winning; Lily remembers he mentioned once that his mother was a chess champion when she attended Oxford. Peter says something and points at something on Sirius's parchment and they laugh in union.

The only people Sirius tells his deepest darkest secrets are all sitting in that corner, Lily thinks. It's hard to remember a time in her Hogwarts experience where the four of them weren't sitting in some corner or stuck halfway up some tree or smuggling noxious potion ingredients through a secret passage; there had to have been a time when the four of them weren't the four of them, but it's lost in Lily's blurred memories of her first few months at school. Lily loves her friends, she loves them a lot, but sometimes she misses the conspiratorial closeness that she and Severus had, the years and years of inside jokes and shared secrets. She doesn't regret her decision, not at all, but she sees that closeness in those four boys and feels momentarily empty.


	4. Monday

The next morning marks the last week of classes before exams begin; Monday is eaten up with an extremely difficult Potions class, where Lily succeeds in brewing a perfect Babbling Beverage, which causes Slughorn to crow with delight and give her 5 point to Gryffindor. Lily's pleased, especially because she's the first to get it right and she notices Snape, whose potion is also very good, staring at her out of the corner of his eye. She blissfully ignores him. Sirius she keeps an eye on through class, but he partners up with Peter and doesn't really speak to anyone else.

Lily has Charms and Ancient Runes in the afternoon, and a Prefect's meeting after dinner. Mary goes off to an extra-long Quidditch practice; James is determined to beat Slytherin in the upcoming match and has been spouting off about it all afternoon. Mary winks at Lily on her way out the door, obviously determined to have a word with a few of the Quidditch team during practice.

The Prefect's meeting is a bit of a waste of time, but Lily sits next to Remus as she usually does. They're wrapping up and Lily leans over to him as he's packing up his bag, which seems to contain an extraordinarily unusual number of old books and rolls of cracking parchment.

"There's no chance I can talk you into giving me a hint with this bet?" she says, giving him her best winning smile. It works on most people, particularly boys. It doesn't seem to have any effect on Remus, who is handsome in a bookish, gangly way, but has never seemed to even glance at Lily like that. Or anyone, really. He rearranges a few pages in his bag and smiles mildly.

"Sorry, no," he says.

"Remus, come on," Lily implores. Remus glances up at her, his honey-colored eyes twinkling.

"You didn't really think that would work, did you?" he laughs.

Lily pouts. "But you do know who it is, don't you?"

"Oh yes," Remus says. "I do indeed. See you later, Lily. I'm off to the library for a bit." And he strolls out the door, looking a lot more cheerful than Lily feels at the moment. Lily stomps back the common room and reluctantly studies for Transfiguration with Dorcas, who reports that nobody else has had any luck.

The Quidditch team tramps in an hour later, grinning and splattered with mud. Mary catches Lily's eye and she and Dorcas follow her up the stairs, where Mary is peeling off her dirty uniform and dropping it into her laundry hamper.

"No good," Mary grunts, wrapping a towel around her middle. "I asked around and nobody seems to have a clue. He spent the whole time showing how he can hang from his knees from his broomstick. I thought Potter was going to take his head off." She vanishes into the bathroom to have a shower.

"Black's being awfully tight lipped about it," Dorcas is changing into her nightgown.

"WAIT!" Mary bellows from the bathroom. There's a clatter and the door flies open, steam pouring into their bedroom. "I've just had an idea!"

"Finish your shower first, you're letting the damp in here," Dorcas says.

"Oh, shut it," Mary vanishes back into the bathroom and the water stops running; she reappears a moment later with her bathrobe on.

"I was just thinking," she says, sitting down on her bed and starting to work a hairbrush through her wet hair. "What if it's Marlene McKinnon?"

"Marlene? Dating Sirius Black?" Lily frowns. "I still write to her quite a bit, you know, and she hasn't mentioned it."

"He did make a point of saying it was someone who goes or did go to Hogwarts," Mary says. "And she's been gone for two years now, she fits."

"She and Sirius were friends when she was in school," Dorcas has climbed into bed and has her Potions text propped up on her knees. "And Merlin knows he dresses like her."

"Black leather does not a relationship make," Lily says. "I just can't see Marlene wanting to date someone two years younger than she is, you know? Especially not a prat like Black."

"I don't know, Lily," Dorcas says. "It's not a bad theory."

"I know Marlene pals around with the Prewett's quite a bit these days," Mary points out. "And Black and Potter hero worship them."

"If I had the option between either Gideon or Fabian Prewett and Sirius Black, I'd choose a Prewett. Doesn't matter which one," Lily says. "But I guess it is possible. It's a great deal more likely than anyone else I can think of."

"I thought so," Mary looks very pleased with herself as she climbs into bed and turns off the light.

The next day passes slowly, as if in anticipation of the match. The heat is oppressive, but Lily forces herself to study anyway. She and Remus spend a few hours studying for Potions, which he's hopeless at, and he still doesn't cave in to her attempts to weasel the information out of him. He even says no at her offer to buy him a significant quantity of Honeydukes best at the upcoming Hogsmede trip.

"I got a lot of chocolate for Christmas one year from my Mum," Remus rolls his eyes, "and Sirius won't let it die so now the whole school thinks I've got a sweet tooth the size of France. As far as rumors go, it could be worse I guess. Sorry, Lily, you need to figure it out on your own."

Lily thinks about Snape, who is so determined that Remus is hiding something with his frequent absences, and sighs.

Wednesday, the day of the match, dawns clear and bright, but is spoiled almost immediately at breakfast. Lily's reading the Daily Prophet over orange juice and sausages when the Owl Post arrives. Remus, to her right, rips open a letter and so do James and Dorcas. A school owl drops off a letter from Petunia into Lily's lap. Lily opens it, and grimaces.

"Ah, the chickens are hatching," Remus is scanning his mother's letter. "Oh Merlin, she sent pictures." He rifles through several Muggle photographs of baby chicks and laughs, then looks up at the large brown barn owl fluttering over his head. "Tell them I'll write them back next week, after Tuesday's over," he says. "She'll worry otherwise." The owl departs.

"About your furry little problem?" Sirius, on Remus's right, asks, picking up a letter of his own. Lily doesn't know what he means. She heard Mary say once that Remus has a badly behaved pet rabbit at home.

"Yes," Remus digs into his waffle with gusto. "You know how she worries."

"Why the long face, Evans?" James, who is sitting a couple seats away, asks.

"It's nothing," Lily says.

"Doesn't look like nothing."

Lily considers for a moment. "It's my sister," she says. "She's getting married this summer."

"Oh," James frowns. "Older sister, right?"

Lily stares at him, surprised he remembers. "Yes, she's older. She just finalized the date of the wedding, that's what the letter's about. How on earth did you remember that?"

"Dunno. And that's bad?"

"I guess," Lily frowns, not really sure how to put her feelings into words. "She loves this bloke, Vernon. And he seems to treat her alright. But he, he's mean. And he sells drills."

"Drills?"

"They're like, I don't know, they're mechanical devices that Muggles use to put in screws and things."

"Right," James nods. "No idea. That's alright. Sounds awful, though."

"He is," Lily agrees. "Give him a wand and a bit of power and he'd probably end up a bit like Avery. And I've got to go to their wedding and be happy for her."

James looks like he's about to respond when Dorcas, who is reading a letter too, covers her mouth with her hand and lets out a little gasp.

"What's wrong?" Peter, to James's left, asks.

"My Mum just wrote to me. I guess there's been another attack on a Muggle village in Wales. Some wizards, I guess a witness says four or five of them in black robes and masks, tortured ten people and murdered two." Dorcas's face twists.

"That's awful," Lily whispers.

"That makes it the third time it's happened in the last two months," James says. "With crazies in masks and all. My dad wrote me about it last week. He's furious about it—can't find anything to connect the attacks to anyone."

"What does your dad do?" Lily feels a bit silly that she doesn't know this.

"He's an Auror!" Dorcas says. "One of the best. My Mum works under him."

"Anyway," James shrugs. "He hasn't had any luck finding out who it is, and he's pissed."

"I've got a pretty good guess," Sirius says darkly from behind his letter, which is written in blue ink and appears to be several pages long.

"Who's that from?" Remus is frowning suddenly, looking alert and attentive.

"Andromeda. She found out about it too, and she's got suspicions. I agree with her." Sirius has got to be referring to his cousin. "Exactly who you think. Bella, and Rodolphus and Rastaban Lestrange, and Malfoy."

Dorcas frowns. "Why don't you tell James's dad, if you think you know who it is? Can't he do something? Someone has to." Sirius laughs bitterly.

"I'm sure he's got an idea," Lily looks to Sirius and James for confirmation. "They do seem the type, don't they."

"There's just no proof. Even Aurors can't march into Castle Loony and attempt to arrest Bellatrix Black without proof. My Mum'd murder them, and call it self defense. Bella might be sadistic and cruel and fucked up, but she's powerful and she's smart."

"Are Andromeda and Ted still hiding?" James asks.

Sirius nods. "Yeah," he says shortly. He stands, swinging one long leg over his chair and grabbing the letter. "The price you pay for being the second-most hated Black family member."

"Second-most?" Lily asks. Sirius grins, but it's a little forced, a mockery of his usual dark amusement.

"Let's just say that Andromeda might have conned my aunt and my parents out of several thousand Galleons and then run off and married a Muggleborn, but at least she was sorted into Slytherin." And he stomps away. Remus, looking worried, pushes his chair back and follows him out of the hall.

Lily stares down at her own letter from her sister, and thinks that maybe it could be worse. And then James, desperate to break the silence, leans across the table in her direction.

"Match this afternoon," he says. He runs his fingers through his hair. "Give me a kiss for luck, Evans?"

Lily resists the urge to fling her full glass of pumpkin juice in his face.


	5. Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there is a fight and some cigarettes and a misogynistic slur in this chapter, be warned

Afternoon classes are cancelled because of the match, but they still have to attend morning ones; Wednesday mornings mean Charms and then Potions. Nobody seems to be able to pay attention; the Gryffindor Slytherin rivalry is legendary, and everyone seems filled with excitement and trepidation. The team members are beside themselves. Mary, sitting next to Lily in Potions, is jittering up and down in her seat so fervently that she has trouble slicing her gurdyroots. James, across the room, keeps tugging his hands through his hair and whispering to Sirius, who finally smacks him upside the head and strides out of the class.

"Now now now, settle down everyone," Slughorn says. "I think, under the circumstances, we'll let class out early, hm? All the best of luck to Slytherin. I'm sorry, I am a bit biased…" The class files out, James muttering violently under his breath, "I'll show you biased you old goat…"

There's a good twenty five minutes til Charms starts, so Lily decides to wander out towards the Great Hall. She's halfway there, deciding on a longer detour to avoid Peeves, who is unscrewing chandeliers at the end of a hallway, when she hears extremely angry shouting from around the corner near the Transfiguration classroom.

Lily draws her wand, just in case, and runs around the corner to find two dark-haired young men locked together, wrestling violently. She can tell, after a moment, that it is Sirius and Regulus Black; Regulus has a fistful of Sirius's long hair and one arm around his neck, Sirius is elbowing his younger brother ferociously in the stomach and trying to throw him off. He succeeds after a moment and shoves Regulus backwards; he slams into the wall and Sirius throws himself at him, grappling for his tie and yanking on it. Regulus knees Sirius in the gut, and then kicks at his shins viciously before seizing him around the neck again.

"Oi!" Lily bellows. "Come on, knock it off!"

Both Blacks freeze and glance up at her, almost-twin features furious. Regulus's bottom lip is split, and Sirius is glaring. Neither of them move.

"I'm not joking," Lily says. "I will go get a teacher!"

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, Evans," Sirius shoves Regulus off him in disgust, slamming him backwards into the wall again. Regulus shoves back and Sirius stumbles backwards then starts forward again.

"Mister Black!" A much more commanding voice than Lily's rings out from down the hallway. Professor McGonagall. Both Sirius and Regulus jump and swing around. "And Mister Black! What on earth do you think you are doing?"

Sirius swings into action, slinging one long arm over his brother's shoulders and flashing McGonagall a dazzling, cocky grin.

"Absolutely nothing, Professor," he says. "Just having a bit of a brotherly tussle, you know, all in good fun. I do miss the little cabbage when he's all the way at the other end of the castle! We like a bit of a wrestle."

"Really," McGonagall crosses her arms. She does not look very convinced. "Mister Black?"

"Absolutely," Regulus nods fervently. "Always have. I hardly ever see my brother anymore, Professor." His poker face is remarkably good.

"Precisely," Sirius says. He's turned on the charm now, his blinding, crooked smile and bright eyes partly obscured by his dark fringe. He can turn it on and off like a tap, and it's infuriating but admittedly amazing. Lily didn't understand for a long time why fewer people don't find Sirius Black absolutely irritating and infantile; she's learned that it's because most people never see that side of him. "Simple brotherly affection. Brings us back to our childhood days, doesn't it Reg?."

"Wasn't much else to do in our home but roughhouse," Regulus supplies.

"And roughhouse we did!" Sirius is on a roll now. "Harkens back to a simpler era, a much more innocent and carefree time. We used to chase each other around and around our home, avoiding the 4th century Black family vases, under the watchful eye of the severed elf heads on the wall…"

McGonagall rolls her eyes, and turns to Lily. "Miss Evans? Is this true?"

"As far as I can tell," Lily lies. "I don't know about the elf heads… but they were just messing about, Professor." Both Blacks grin very similar grins; Regulus looks rather desperate. McGonagall's eyes are very stern; Lily feels her insides quivering but holds on to her straight face somehow.

"Very well," McGonagall says after a long moment. "But Mister Black, next time you feel the need to physically demonstrate your brotherly affection, please try to do it somewhere other than right outside my classroom." And she strides away.

"Get off me," Regulus throws Sirius's arms off his shoulder as soon as McGonagall is out of earshot.

"Oh, don't complain, little brother," Sirius snarls, taking a few steps backwards. "I did just get us all out of detention, after all." Regulus glares at him darkly, fingering the cut on his lip. "Or maybe that's what you wanted!" Sirius continues. "A letter home saying that you tried to beat up your disgrace of a brother would certainly make Mummy happy with you, now wouldn't it. Then again, you were Muggle brawling with me, so I don't think she'll be pleased about that." He shrugs. Regulus's face is furious; Sirius's is filled with a dark glee that is much more sinister. They looked like brothers, momentarily united against McGonagall. Now, it's obvious to Lily what the differences are. Standing next to anyone else, Regulus Black at 15 would be handsome; he has glossy dark hair, dark eyes and classic, straight features. Compared to his brother, he looks like a shadow, a bad copy. He doesn't have Sirius's charm, his way with words, the naughty glint in his eye, the cocky twist to his lip. Compared to Sirius, Regulus looks flat.

"Shut up, Sirius," Regulus snaps. "You don't know anything about it. You can't say things like that to me anymore."

"Come on," Lily tries to interject; she reaches out to grab at Sirius's arm, but Sirius shakes her off.

"I know enough," Sirius says. "I'm sure you're clamoring all over her for attention now, trying to prove that you're the son that gets it. She'll understand, if she finds out about you brawling. She knows as well as you do that it's the only way you could ever beat me. I've always been a faster draw than you Reg, and a much better dueler."

"You're not," Regulus says.

"Whatever," Sirius sneers. "I'm not going to argue with you. She knows, and you know and so do I. Do you know what she calls us, to her friends? The heir and the spare."

"Shut up, Sirius, just shut up!"

"It's true!" Sirius says. "I've heard her say it. She had two of us, just in case one went wrong. That's what we are to her, Reg."

Regulus's fist collides with Sirius's face. Blood sprays upwards in an arc, and Sirius stumbles backwards, clutching at his nose. He charges forward again, but Lily decides now is the time to take action; she seizes him bodily around the middle and drags him backwards.

"Get off me Evans, get off," Sirius shouts, but lets Lily grab his arm and start in the other direction.

"Do not push me right now, Black," she snaps.

"I might be the 'spare,'" Regulus shouts after them. "But at least I don't have to rely on a filthy little Mudblood bitch to fight my battles for me!"

Before Sirius can remove his hands from his face, Lily whirls around with her wand out.

"Cor," Sirius says thickly, as he's got both his hands clamped over his nose, which is streaming blood. "That was an impressive Bat Bogey Hex, Evans."

"Thank you," Lily says tartly. "Come on." She drags him around the corner.

"I think the little fucker broke it," Sirius is feeling his nose gingerly."Hopefully his bogeys eat him."

"Stop poking at it, honestly, boys," Lily swats Sirius's hands away. He frowns at her. "Don't get your pants in a twist," Lily growls. "Episkey," She waves her wand, and Sirius's nose straightens itself. He runs his fingers along it, before winking at her.

"What do you think, Evans? Still on straight? Is my beauty gone?"

Lily sighs. "It's as haughty and aristocratic as it ever was," she says.

"Good," Sirius says. "I couldn't continue living without a haughty and aristocratic nose. So many haughty and aristocratic things have been taken from me, but I can at the very least look the part." He wriggles it experimentally.

"What was that about?" Lily says softly. Sirius meets her eyes and she is momentarily struck by how keen his gaze is, how troubled. That look vanishes as fast as she can spot it, and he's laughing again.

"What it's always about. I think Regulus is a twat. Regulus disagrees."

"Black," Lily crosses her arms and gives Sirius her Prefect Look. She's cultivated it very carefully on First year boys trying to sneak frog spawn into their rooms, Fourth year girls trying to get out of the common room to kiss a boy from another house in the corridor, and James Potter. "I did just save you from detention," Lily presses.

"No offense Evans," Sirius says (Lily's Look didn't seem to have worked), "but I don't think I can stomach a heart to heart with you right now."

"I get it, you know," Lily replies. "Sibling stuff. My sister and I don't exactly get along either. We don't exactly beat each other up in hallways but that's mostly because she wouldn't condescend to be seen in the same room as me right now." She shoves her wand back into her bag to avoid the fact that Sirius is studying her with frightening intensity.

"Do you beat each other up when you are in the same room?" he asks curiously.

"Well, she did slap me last time she saw me," Lily winces. "Because I might have implied that I think her fiance's a pig. But we've never gotten along, not really."

"Well," Sirius says. "My parents are a pair of twisted, sick fucks from a long line of twisted sick fucks, and my dear baby brother just eats it all right up like a twisted sick fuck in training. Their favourite hobby is hating me, which works well for me because I get a great deal of pleasure from hating them too. And we had a great bloody row because they want to know the whereabouts of the only other person in this family who's realized they're all mad so they can hunt her down and, I don't know, brainwash her all over again. So it could be worse." There are spots of colour on Sirius's cheeks and he's breathing rather hard; he looks as though he's surprised himself. He makes a great show of digging around in his pockets and pulling out a cigarette, which he lights with the tip of his wand.

"I," Lily isn't sure what to say, so she settles on, "Don't smoke that inside." Sirius just makes a face.

"Thanks for, you know, backing up my story with McGonagall," he says, breathing out smoke. It curves around his cheekbones and tangles in his hair. He has blood all over his collar.

"The only reason I did it is so you wouldn't have to be in detention tonight instead of playing in the match," Lily says. Sirius looks at her in surprise, then barks out laughter.

"So don't let him win," Lily says, fiercely. Sirius smiles, a small and rather honest one.

"Yes ma'am," he says.


	6. Wednesday Afternoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> quidditch wahoo

It's a beautiful, bright afternoon, perfect for watching Quidditch. Lily files into the stands with Dorcas Alice and Amelia, and ends up sitting next to Remus and Peter. Remus sits down and pulls a book out of his bag and into his lap. When Lily raises an eyebrow at him, he shrugs.

"At this point everyone's given up on any chance of me actually following Quidditch," he says. "The intricacies of it go right over my head." Peter snorts.

"I don't think you can count the way Padfoot plays as intricate. More like bull in a china shop," he laughs.

"Dog in a china shop?"

"More accurate. Sugar quill?"

"Thanks, Wormtail," Remus takes one and turns a page in his book. Lily rolls her eyes. And then Benjy Fenwick, who is commentating the match, picks up his megaphone and roars "GOOD AFTERNOON HOGWARTS!" Seven figures, clad in scarlet, stride out onto the field, meeting seven green-clad bodies in the middle. Regulus Black, Lily is slightly disappointed to see, is playing. The crowds explode with noise as James shakes the hand of the Slytherin captain, Wilkes. The stands are solidly divided into two huge waves of scarlet and gold and silver and green. The Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs have all picked sides. Alice borrowed a red and gold shirt from Lily to show her support for Frank. Several Slytherin students have constructed a huge silver paper snake that they're holding up over their heads; it undulates and glitters in the summer breeze . The Gryffindor students brought noisemakers; their side of the stands explodes with noise when James climbs on his broom and kicks off. Peter is waving a huge, homemade banner over his head that reads "LIONS FOR THE CUP!"

"They have this, right? No contest?" Lily asks Alice, who knows the most about Quidditch out of the four of them. She chews her bottom lip.

"I'd like to think so. I've played against both teams and Gryffindor is really, really good," she says this somewhat begrudgingly. "But Slytherin plays dirty, when they can. Not all of them, not Black for a start. Sirius is a dirtier player than Black." The distinction between their names makes Lily snort. "But Wilkes will, and Avery will. So as long as Gryffindor's ready for that, they'll be fine."

"They will be," Lily wants to give James the benefit of the doubt. He, of all people, would assume that Slytherin would bend the rules, seeing as he spends so much of his time bending the rules to get back at them.

"Aaaand there's the Snitch. GAME ON! And Weasley with the Quaffle, amazingly fast on a broom is Bilius Weasley. I will argue that the Gryffindor Chasers are the strongest trio this school has seen in quite some time, Weasley passes to MacDonald, nicely dodges that Bludger there, now it's over to Potter who's, yup, he's going for the point. NO YOU'RE TOO SLOW, GRYFFINDOR SCORES! A MINUTE IN AND TEN ZERO GRYFFINDOR!" Fenwick bellows, and the game begins in earnest.

Lily's never been a keen follower of Quidditch; she enjoys the idea of it simply because it is so different from any sport Muggles ever play. She doesn't really understand the frenzy that her friends whip themselves up into over it. But this match is undeniably one of the fastest, and most brutal, she has ever watched. The intense rivalry between Gryffindor and Slytherin seems to have driven its players into a fury, especially because it becomes obvious that the Gryffindor team, particularly the Chasers, are outflying Slytherin by a mile. James goes to score again and is nearly knocked off his broom by a well-hit Bludger from the Slytherin beater Mulciber. He swerves and curses, but drops the Quaffle, which is recovered by Lucinda Talkalot, the Slytherin Chaser.

"Slytherin's team is strong too, of course, and headed by a new Quidditch captain this year—great success, getting her team to the final her first year on the job! Talkalot following in the footsteps of her very successful older brother Stephen—he, of course, led the team to win the cup six years ago. OH SHE'S INTERCEPTED! Very nice Bludger work by Shacklebolt there." Lily cheers, because she's always liked Kingsley. "Potter with the Quaffle again, passes to MacDonald, to Weasley, back to Potter—and—and—OH, BLOCKED! And the Quaffle is recovered by Rosier…"

Rosier goes on to score, faking out McGonagall (no relation, as far as Lily knows, to Professor McGonagall). Slytherin's scoring seems to kick Gryffindor into gear; Mary catches the Quaffle and flies straight across the field, dodging both Beaters. Sirius aids her by sending a neatly aimed Bludger right into the middle of the Slytherin Chasers on her tail, who scatter. For the first time since the match starts, Remus cheers. Mary scores, and flies in a victory lap, pumping her fists in the air. Lily and Alice leap from their seats and Peter shakes his sign furiously in the air.

Gryffindor scores twice more, making the score forty-ten. The Slytherin keeper, who is a large, hulking brute that Lily doesn't know, looks like a cumbersome bear on a broomstick next to James and Bilius Weasley, who practically dance through the air. Weasley recovers the Quaffle again; even from this distance, Lily sees he's grinning. He streaks towards the goalpost, a blur of red hair and gold uniform.

"Aaaaaand there's Weasley, this looks promising," Fenwick bellows into the microphone, "OH THAT WAS DIRTY!" Three sharp blows to the whistle; Madame Hooch has called a foul.

Mulciber, getting desperate to stop Weasley's inevitable score, had aimed a Bludger right at him; it had collided with the back of his head, which had collided with the handle of his broomstick. He lands somewhat woozily on the ground, blood streaming down his face. James lands next to him, and so does Mulciber and Talkalot, and James is yelling and gesticulating wildly with his hands. Madame Hooch blows her whistle again.

"PENALTY TO GRYFFINDOR! Potter to take the shot!" James makes it easily, viciously, making the score fifty-ten. Weasley is back on his broom, but flying a little unsteadily. But Gryffindor's pulled far enough ahead that all they need to do now is stop Slytherin from scoring again, and hope Frank catches the Snitch.

Frank has been circling the pitch, high above the rest of the players, keeping out of the way until the team pulls enough points to give them the required 40-point lead. James's penalty shot flies through the middle goalpost, and Frank immediately moves closer to the action, dropping 10 feet, Regulus Black quick on his heels. He seems to be waiting for Frank to make a move, rather than watching for the Snitch himself.

"Black's a good Seeker," Alice whispers in Lily's ear. "He's fast. Frank has to be careful."

Frank seems to realize Black's strategy; he rockets skyward again, then dives. Black follows him frantically and Frank pulls up sharply as Black flies sideways into the stands, wheeling around to track him down again. Frank starts circling again, eyes obviously peeled for the Snitch.

Meanwhile, Mary has been in possession of the Quaffle, but wasn't able to score. Weasley recovers it, but is flying more slowly and unsteadily; Lily suspects he probably has a concussion. Talkalot easily recovers the Quaffle from him and begins to fly, uninterrupted, towards the Gryffindor goalposts. Kingsley and Sirius have been keeping an eye on Frank and Mary is halfway across the field with Weasley; James streaks after Talkalot, but can't seem to get fast enough. A Bludger, aimed by Kingsley, pelts in her direction but seems miles off. Amelia, in the seat next to Lily, is screaming frantically and Peter is bellowing something indistinguishable. Lily is holding her breath.

All of a sudden, James pulls his broom up about five feet and stops moving ("WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING PRONGS?" yells Peter). What happens next happens so fast that Lily almost misses it; she happens to be looking upward, scanning for the second Bludger (which is being held in control by Kingsley, high above the crowd) when it happens.

Sirius, Beater bat in hand, throws one leg over his broom and drops. Lily shrieks, Dorcas nearly falls out of her seat. Sirius plummets straight down, Quidditch robes and long dark hair fluttering wildly over his head. The entire stadium is on its feet, screaming. And then Sirius catches himself with one hand on James's broom (James immediately wraps both his hands around Sirius's elbow) and with the other thwacks the Bludger, which Kingsley sent his way, at Talkalot. It smashes into the Quaffle in her hands, which she drops.

The crowd explodes. James and Sirius, both squashed onto one broomstick, wave and high five and Sirius leaps elegantly off James's broomstick back to his own, which has flown down next to them. Madame Hooch seems to be in too much shock to call a penalty.

Play resumes pretty quickly, and brutally. Rosier seizes the back of Mary's broom and tries to yank her off of it; they're rewarded another penalty, which Mary takes and gets. Not soon after, Slytherin gets a penalty shot when Sirius viciously elbows Rosier in the ribs.

And then all of a sudden, Lily sees it; a flash of gold near the bottom of the Slytherin goalpost. Frank apparently sees it too. He dives, dodging around a collection of Chasers and Kingsley. But Regulus Black is following closely after him, drawing level. He's smaller than Frank, lighter on his broom. The whole school is silent, holding his breath, as the two Seekers race neck-and-neck, colliding into each other, struggling to get ahead.

And then suddenly Sirius is flying, seemingly out of nowhere, diving straight at his brother. Regulus pulls up and Sirius misses him by inches, wheeling back into the air, both arms outstretched over his head. Lily can hear Regulus's cursing from here, and the Slytherins are screaming in outrage but it doesn't matter because Frank's fingers close over the tiny golden Snitch.

Dorcas hurtles herself across two seats to throw her arms around Lily, and she collides backwards with Remus and Peter and they all leap up and down, arms entangled with each other. The Gryffindor Quidditch team has collided in midair, a huge, many-armed shouting mass of red and gold. They land, and the crowd rushes forward into the field; Lily is borne with them. Dorcas drags her forward as James is lifted onto the shoulders of the crowd. He is carried towards Dumbledore, who passes him the huge, shining Inter House Cup, and he vanishes under a wave of red-clad arms and hands hugging him.

Lily struggles past Frank and Alice, who are snogging so ferociously Lily is surprised Alice's face isn't coming right off, Weasley, who is grinning maniacally around the blood smeared across his face, Rosier, who is swearing in a steady stream, and McGonagall, who is mopping her eyes on a huge Gryffindor flag. Mary hurtles towards them out of the crowd, flinging her arms around Lily's neck and screaming incoherently into her hair. They collide with Peter, Sirius, Remus and James, who are tangled together in a huge mass. James, still clutching the Cup, is sobbing incoherently. Sirius, grinning like a wild dog, shouts at Remus; Lily hears his words very clearly.

"I can always tell when you actually come to our matches!"

"Why's that," Remus's mouth is wry.

"You cheer at the wrong moments," Sirius throws back his head and laughs.

"We're throwing a party!" Peter is shouting over the din. "Party in the Gryffindor common room! Starts in an hour, goes until they shut us up!"

As the crowd begins to disperse, Lily looks over at Dorcas and sighs.

"You know they're never going to shut up about this, ever, ever again," she says.

Dorcas just laughs.


	7. Saturday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> contains some swearing and fighting, just fyi

Lily's absolutely right; James and Sirius reenact the broom jumping incident for anyone who will ask, and many people do. They are inordinately pleased with themselves, and Lily finds it hard to fault them, even though it gets old after a couple of days. The weather is placating her, they threw a magnificent party that evening that didn't end until McGonagall stomped into the common room around 3 AM and yelled at them all to shut up, they all staggered to class the next morning very hungover (even Lily, who usually didn't drink the firewhiskey she knew James and Sirius knicked from somewhere) and they've won the Cup. It is hard to feel truly upset about anything.

They have a Hogsmede trip that Saturday, a warm, slightly overcast morning perfect for sipping a butterbeer outside the Three Broomsticks. Lily walks to the village with Mary, Dorcas and Amelia. Their impending exams are looming, with Arithmancy and Astronomy on Monday, so Lily is determined to have a long, relaxing afternoon before she studies again.

"I studied for five hours for Arithmancy yesterday," Amelia says, stepping around some mud in her sensible black shoes. "And I'll probably do three tonight and maybe five or six tomorrow…"

"Amelia," Mary says lazily, "would you please shut up?"

Amelia frown at her but complies.

"It's hard to believe though, isn't it?" Dorcas twists a loose strand of hair back into her plait. "This set of exams and then it's our final year in school. It went so fast."

"If we pass," Amelia says.

"We'll pass," Lily says cheerfully.

"You won't if you don't study."

"Oh, come off it for today, will you? We'll study tomorrow. Let's go get a butterbeer and then look at the shops. You can pick up a new quill for the Arithmancy exam."

Mollified, Amelia follows them into the Three Broomsticks, which is packed. They wave at Frank and Alice, who are sitting at a small corner table, and Lily purposefully skirts around a group of Slytherins that contains both Regulus Black and Severus. They all turn and glare at Mary, resentment left over from their Quidditch loss. In trying to avoid their group, they are maneuvered directly into a round table which contains James, Sirius, Remus, Peter and a large pile of parchment. Mary accidentally bumps the table with her hip, sending a pile of papers tumbling towards Peter's lap. He grabs at them, and then makes a great show of flipping them upside down so they can't be read.

"Don't tell me you lot are actually studying," Amelia says, a note of panic creeping back into her voice.

"No, we wouldn't dare," Sirius is dressed in Muggle clothes and looks like he hopped off the cover of a rock album. Anybody else would look ridiculous. Lily isn't going to give him the benefit of saying he looks cool, but he certainly doesn't look stupid.

James, also dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, has for some reason leapt to his feet, probably as a ploy to distract them from whatever the pile of parchment contains; the specifics of their newest prank, probably. The action is not graceful and he barely manages to catch his chair from crashing backwards to the floor; he fumbles and sets it flat, then tugs a hand through his hair.

"Evans," he says and Lily sighs. "You look lovely today."

"Potter," Lily responds. "You look like you're up to something."

"Not particularly, no," James leans one hand on the table and places the other on his hip. He smiles. "You do look like you could use a Butterbeer, though, and I would be willing to get you one if you want."

Behind him, a slow smile is spreading across Sirius's face and he gets quietly to his feet. Lily can see Remus roll his eyes and also stifle his laughter with one hand. Copying James's nonchalant pose, Sirius starts pawing his hands through his hair.

"No thanks," Lily manages to keep her laughter out of her voice. Next to her, Mary is fighting very hard to keep a straight face. "I'd rather get one myself."

"You sure?" James leans towards her, ruffling his hair again. "You can sit with me too, we've got room." Sirius flexes his arm muscles and pouts his lips, and continues to ruffle his hair so it is standing on end. Dorcas has turned her back on them and is silently laughing into her hands.

"It's alright," Lily's voice quivers just a little. "I'd like to sit with my friends."

"We've got room for them too," James shrugs. Behind him, his hands still in his hair, Sirius begins to gyrate his hips, the expression on his face smouldering. And Lily can't hold it in anymore; she bursts out laughing.

James whirls around and sees Sirius, hair askew and hips gyrating wildly, and his face goes a dangerous shade of maroon.

"GET STUFFED BLACK!" He shouts.

"Ooh, Evans, Evans," Sirius strikes a ridiculous pose. "Seeing you in that skirt is really yanking my chain, Evans!"

"I'M GOING TO MURDER YOU," James bellows, and launches himself in Sirius's direction. The chair he was leaning against topples, and they both crash to the floor.

"Shouldn't you, er, stop them?" Dorcas says hesitantly, watching Sirius and James grapple around angrily on the floor. The busy room has cleared to make space for them. At the bar, Madame Rosmerta rolls her eyes and turns around.

"Not worth the effort," Peter's attention has returned to his butterbeer, which he drains. "They're always like that. If you get in the middle, they just drag you into it."

"Sorry about that," Remus grins sheepishly.

"Oh, it's okay," Lily smiles. "He didn't really even get a fair chance, poor guy."

"He should stop doing that in front of Sirius," Peter agrees. "You all having a nice day?"

"Very," Lily says.

"I want another butterbeer," Sirius says, surfacing from the floor. "Moony? Wormy?"

Peter hands Sirius a sickle, and Remus digs around in his pocket for a minute before producing one. When he offers it, Sirius frowns. "I've got them, don't worry about it."

"Don't be daft. You're a disinherited prince. You can't afford to buy everyone drinks."

"I've got money. I've got 5 galleons. I won them off of Kingsley. He bet me I couldn't make that shot during the match, and I did."

Remus shoves the coin at Sirius, who takes it and moves away towards the bar. Lily sees him slip one of the sickles into Remus's bag, which is hanging over his chair. Nobody else sees.

"Well, we are going to get butterbeers and then do a bit of shopping," Mary says, grabbing at Lily's arm. "Have a nice day, you lot!"

"You too," Peter says. "And stay away from the Slytherin table at dinner tonight, just a word of advice."

"Oh, don't you worry," Lily says sarcastically.

They drink their butterbeer and wander into the bookshop and then into Gladrags Wizardwear, where Dorcas finds a pair of earrings that are charmed to compliment the wearer's hair. Lily picks up a scarf she thinks Petunia might like, and resolves not to tell her it's from a wizard shop. They stop into Dervish & Banges so Amelia can pick up her scales, which she had sent to be repaired last week, and then have biscuits and coffee in Madame Puddifoot[']s. It's almost 3 when they decide to head back to the castle. They end up walking behind the group of fifth, sixth and seventh year Slytherins from the Three Broomsticks, comprised mostly of people Lily hates. Mary's lips tighten when Avery happens to turn around them and notice them.

"Look who it is," he sneers. He's got a thin, bony face, built for sneering.

"The most useless member of the Gryffindor Quidditch team and her Mudblood friends," Mulciber interjects. There's a great deal of sniggering.

Mary's lips tighten even further, and Dorcas grabs her arm and hisses, "Just ignore him, come on."

It doesn't work. "At least I don't resort to bludgeoning people in the back of the head to win. I don't have to."

"Oh, you mean Weasley? Nobody even noticed the difference," Avery laughs and pulls a face, pulling at his ears and sticking his tongue out. It's obviously meant to be an impression of Bilius Weasley, and apparently it's hilarious.

"I've never noticed you flying in a straight line," Mary retorts, "and nobody hit you with a Bludger. Guess it just comes naturally to pureblood wizards. Inbreeding, or something."

"She doesn't know what she's saying," Severus says quietly from behind Avery. They ignore him.

"We're no better than the company we keep, MacDonald," Mulciber's eyes move past Amelia to Dorcas, and then settle on Lily. "But a blood traitor like you wouldn't even notice the difference, would you?"

"Come on," Lily tugs at Mary, who shakes her off. "They're just bitter because they lost."

"At least nobody on the Gryffindor team had to buy their way on," Mary snarls. "We beat you. Get that through your thick brain. We beat you because we're good."

"Not that good," Regulus Black snaps. "Sirius cheated, and you know it."

"Or guts just aren't hereditary," Mary laughs, and Regulus flushes.

"Come on, Mary," Amelia's voice is a little panicked.

"Listen to your friend, MacDonald," Mulciber is easily twice Mary's size, with huge shoulders. But Mary's fearless, and a very fast dueler. "You're making me angry."

"I'm quaking in my shoes," Mary rolls her eyes.

"You're outnumbered, and your gallant hero friends aren't here to keep an eye on you," Rosier, who would be handsome if he weren't so horrible, snips.

"Saint Potter," Severus sneers.

"Saint Potter's worth ten of you, and he's a twat," Mary retorts.

Mulciber goes for his wand and Mary does, too which means that Avery and Amelia and Rosier and Dorcas also have theirs out a second later.

"Knock it off!" Lily shouts, shoving her way into the middle of it. "Mary, Mulciber, put them away. Now."

"Make me," Mulciber turns his wand towards her. Mary's inches closer to his face.

"I don't have to, I can just call Dumbledore," Lily says. "Or have you forgotten that one of us is a Prefect? Put it away."

"Don't be an idiot, Mulciber," Severus says.

He does, after a long moment and everyone else does too. They turn and start wandering up the path towards the Shrieking Shack, but Mulciber shouts, "Watch your back, MacDonald!"

"You don't scare me, you fuck!" Mary bellows back.

Severus lingers for a moment, catching Lily's eye. They haven't spoken properly since last May; she saw him hanging around near her house a couple times over the summer, and ignored him. Lily's not really interested in bridging that gap right now.

"What?"

"You really shouldn't have done that," he says quietly. "You're going to get yourselves into trouble."

"Get the fuck out of my way, Snape," Mary whirls around and heads off towards the castle, Dorcas and Amelia following.

"I can take care of myself, and so can she," Lily says, crossing her arms.

"I know," Severus frowns. "She just picked the wrong person to get into a fight with."

"Let me worry about my friends," Lily says. "You worry about yours." And she turns to follow Mary, Dorcas and Amelia back to the castle. She thinks that maybe she should have mentioned to Severus about staying away from the Slytherin table around dinnertime, then decides after that spectacle they all deserve what's coming to them.

Lily manages not to feel at all guilty when every dish on the Slytherin table explodes halfway through dinner, splattering its inhabitants with meat pie and gravy. There's a great deal of shouting and McGonagall leaps out of her seat and everyone looks for James and Sirius, who are looking around with expressions of surprised innocence. Nobody is fooled.

Later that night as they're getting into bed, Mary is still recounting the details of the exploding food with delight. "And did you see Mulciber's face when his potato burst all over it? It was incredible. I ought to thank them for that. James and Sirius, I mean."

"I notice you didn't report them, Lily," Dorcas says slyly.

"I'm sure they'll get what's coming to them in another way," Lily shrugs. "Another other day I might have. I know that makes me a terrible Prefect, but Mulciber and Avery did call me a Mudblood."

"Creepy fucks," Mary agrees.

"I really want to know if they all call Potter Saint Potter behind his back," Lily muses, climbing into bed. "And why on earth they thought that would get a rise out of us. Honestly."

"They probably know you are annoyed by him?" Dorcas says.

"I guess," Lily continues. "But I don't know why they thought to bring it up, or bring them up."

"Lily," Mary says from across the room. "You heard that whole argument, and you choose to be annoyed by the fact that Avery brought up Potter's name?"

"No," Lily frowns. "It was just weird, that's all."

"Alright," Mary and Dorcas exchange a look that Lily can't read.

"What was that?" she snaps. "That look. What was it?"

"Lily—" Dorcas starts, then seems to change her mind. "Nothing. It was nothing. Go to sleep."

"Dorcas!" Lily shouts, but both Dorcas and Mary grin at each other and turn off their lights. Lily gives up.


	8. Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> contains some nudity, and boys being rude

Tonight is the night, Lily thinks, as she sits herself in front of the fire in the common room Tuesday night after dinner. It's the second day of exams; they've completed Arithmancy and Astronomy (late Monday night), and Defense Against the Dark Arts today. And when Lily was passing Peter, Sirius, James and Remus leaving the lunch table, she had clearly overheard an intriguing snippet of conversation.

"I've been given permission to take the History of Magic exam on Thursday. Dumbledore's organized it," Remus was saying.

"Wish I could get permission to take it later," Peter had said. "We're all going to be exhausted, come tomorrow morning."

"Don't bloody remind me," Sirius had groaned. "The worst one to have to take after an hour of sleep, too."

"You don't have to come," Remus had started to say, but James had cut him off.

"Nonsense, of course we do. History of Magic's a piece of cake anyway. You better commit, Padfoot, unless you think it'll take time away from your snogging!"

"I think I can do both," Sirius had laughed.

They're planning something, and Sirius's girl is somehow involved. If he isn't sneaking off to see the girl in secret, the least Lily can do is catch them in the middle of a prank and give them detention. She isn't exactly sure how Remus is involved or what his comments mean, but he had left before dinner, announcing that he had to go visit his mother.

So she stays in the common room longer than she usually does and watches as it clears out. She shoos Dorcas up the stairs early and Mary is off with a group of people playing Quidditch. Lily halfheartedly reviews Potions notes, and waits.

Around nine, Lily is beginning to yawn and the room is mostly empty. She contemplates giving up when Peter comes into the common room alone and crosses to the portrait hole, whistling to himself. Lily frowns and thinks about getting up to follow him out when she notices what looks like the hem of a cloak floating along behind him in midair. He holds the portrait open slightly longer than necessary and she's sure; Black and Potter are underneath Potter's invisibility cloak and they're all sneaking out of the castle.

Lily gives them a solid minute before she stands and slips out of the portrait hole. She creeps along the hallway in the dark, trying to move as quietly as possible. As a result, her progress is slow. She loses sight of Peter after a while, and curses to herself before deciding that they're probably heading outside, considering that the night is warm and the moon is rising full and beautiful above the castle. She understands the temptation. So she heads towards the Great Hall, nearly getting stopped by Peeves and feeling very pleased with herself when she ducks into an empty classroom to avoid him. At the last minute, Lily doubles back, deciding that the three boys definitely weren't sneaking out of the Great Hall; she heads towards a side entrance out of the castle, the one out of the Long Gallery.

All this sneaking around isn't so hard, Lily thinks. Invisibility cloak or no invisibility cloak.

She makes it to the doors, which are closed but unlocked, and slips down the steps and across the lawn. The moon is enormous and yellow and bright; it illuminates the sweep of grass in pale, luminous light. Every shadow is picked out in clear detail. Lily doesn't see any of the three boys, but she creeps down the steps and around the greenhouses, towards the Quidditch sheds, the Whomping Willow and the forest.

She's rounding the furthest shed and beginning to wonder if they haven't left the castle after all when she hears it; a series of barks, like a dog, and a low, vicious growling. It's coming from the direction of the Whomping Willow, which doesn't make any sense because the tree is vicious and nobody's been allowed to go near it since Davey Gudgeon almost lost an eye two years ago. The limbs of the tree are unusually still, though. Lily takes a few more steps away from the shed and towards the tree when something barrels into her line of vision, seizes her around the shoulders and drags her bodily backwards.

Lily shrieks and lashes out with her fists, which make contact with somebody's face. Hands are trying to get a hold of her wrists, so she knees whoever it is viciously in the stomach a few times. She manages to throw her attacker off with another kick to the shins and is scrabbling for her wand and preparing to make a break for it when she realizes the person hopping up and down in pain and rage is all too familiar to her.

James Potter is clutching his shin and letting off a string of unintelligible curse words that eventually dissolve into a "Bloody hell, Evans!"

He swears very loudly again and grabs both her wrists in his hands; his fingers are callused and very strong, undoubtedly from Quidditch.

"What on earth are you doing here?" he spits, his face inches from hers. His eyebrows are drawn down and his eyes are furious. Real anger, Lily realizes. But she's angry too.

"What am I—what are you doing out here? Let go of me!" She yanks her wrists back.

"This is a really bad time for you to decide to be nosy," James growls.

"Nosy!" Lily's furious now. "Let me remind you, Potter, that you're the one breaking out of the school in the middle of the night and I am a Prefect and—"

There is another series of low, rumbling growls and snarls from around the other side of the shed. "Usually I'd be rejoicing that you're saying more than three words to me," James hisses, grabbing at her hand again and pulling her away from the lawn, "but really, really shut up right now."

Lily's stomach starts to sink. They've done something, got themselves into some kind of very bad trouble. She's never seen James Potter look so worried, or so serious. "What on earth are you doing? Why aren't you wearing any trousers?"

James is in his pants and glasses and nothing else. His pants are covered in gold Snitches. He is, Lily has to admit, very fit, in a lanky, string bean-y kind of way. His jaw is set very tight. "Nice night," he says shortly. "And what I'm doing is none of your business. You have to get back to the castle as fast as you can, I mean it."

"Not until you tell me what you're doing," Lily says stubbornly. James glances distractedly over his shoulder and pulls her further around the shed, towards the castle. She shakes free of his grip again.

"Now is a really bad time," he snaps. "Where the fuck did Padfoot go…"

"Black is out here too?" Lily yells, and James whirls on her and clamps his hand over her mouth.

"Lily," he hisses. He hardly ever calls her by her first name. "Seriously. Shut up." Lily bites him in the hand and he swears, hopping backwards on bare feet.

"Fucking fuck—Sirius. SIRIUS! Oh for Merlin's… there you are."

A dark shape is sprinting towards them away from the tree. It's a dog, an enormous shaggy black dog with shining dark eyes. It runs up to them and sniffs and stops and cocks its head in a very un-doglike movement.

"Look, I didn't bring her out here to show off, okay?" The dog whines. "I know, shut up you berk." Lily looks at him in confusion. "We're fucked if we don't do something right now. Is he done? Is he on his way out?"

"Yeah," Sirius Black is standing where the dog was moments before. He is wearing a dog collar around his neck—in the moonlight, Lily can read that it says "Padfoot." Other than that, he is absolutely naked.

Lily shrieks and throws her hands over her eyes.

"Oh shut it, Evans, I know your night just got a whole lot better so don't complain," Sirius says unselfconsciously. "And yes, he's out. He's… there, you see him? Was heading towards the forest, but he could follow me this way."

"And of course you aren't wearing any pants," James's voice sounds resigned.

"WHY ARE YOU BOTH OUT IN THE WOODS WITHOUT CLOTHES," Lily yells, hands still clamped over her face. Sirius Black is admittedly very fit and has very nice shoulders, but the sight of his naked thighs, one of which looks like it might have a tattoo of a lion on it, is too much for her to deal with right now.

"Told you, long story." James replies. "Where's Pete?"

"Pettigrew's here too?" Lily feels like she may be going mad. "Is he wearing clothes?"

"None that you'd recognize," Sirius chuckles. "He's back by the tree, but he's not any help."

"Then will one of you tell me what is going on?" Lily says again.

"Later, okay? You've got to head him off, Pads," James says. "I'll get Lily back into the castle. Get him into the forest, I don't care how. Just do not let him come this way."

"Too late," Sirius shrinks back a couple of steps; he seems to be sniffing the air. "He's not close, but he will be in a minute."

"Then go!" James shoves his shoulder, and all of a sudden Sirius is gone and the big black dog is back. It bounds away from the sheds and across the grass.

"He's an Animagus?"Lily drops her hands from her eyes. "Do you know how illegal that is?"

"Yes, I'm aware," James hisses.

"You can still wear clothes, if you're an Animagus," Lily feels the need to point out. She fears her retinas might be permanently damaged.

"Try telling him that. Now hush."

There is another shape, shaggier and stocky and huge, moving across the grass. The dog runs up to it, and there are snarls and barks and a long, lonely howl.

"Is that a wolf?" Lily manages.

"Sort of."

"Sort of?" Something is dawning on her, very slowly. It's the moon, so bright and dominating the sky, and James's tight jaw and the real fear in his eyes. "What have you done?" she whispers. James shakes his head.

"I haven't done anything. I'll explain later, Lily I promise. Get down." James crouches behind the shed and Lily crouches behind him, puts one hand on his back to balance herself. His skin is chilly and he's broken out in goose pimples.

"I'm going to murder you," Lily mutters.

"It's not you I'm worried about right now."

"Can't we sneak back under your invisibility cloak?" She whispers in his ear.

"It's a wolf, Evans," he says. "He'll smell you. And anyway, don't have it on me."

"You did."

"Well, I don't anymore. Where would it be, down my pants?"

They sit, motionless, for another few long moments; it's probably only five but it feels like an age. Lily's calves are cramping. And then something rustles in the grass next to Lily's right foot; it's so quiet that it sounds thunderous. Lily, scared nearly out of her skin, shrieks and topples over. It's a rat, a large, glossy brown garden rat.

"What now? Are they in the forest?" James says to it. And all of a sudden the rat is growing, changing, expanding—and Peter Pettigrew, mercifully fully clothed, is crouching next to them.

"Not you too," Lily groans.

"James," Peter's a little out of breath and his eyes are wide and panicked. "Something's wrong. There's someone in the forest. What the hell are you doing here, Evans?"

"Why is it that you three are allowed to sneak around at night all you want, and as soon as I do it you question me?" Lily hisses. Peter's eyebrows shoot up, but he turns back to James.

"What do you mean, someone's in the forest?"

"A person. I thought it was a body at first, but they're alive. It was a little hard to tell from my vantage point," Peter lowers one hand towards the ground, "but it's a girl, she's blonde and she's wearing Gryffindor colors."

"Oh my God—"Lily says.

"Did—did he—" James seems to be strangling on his words.

"No, not him. I think she's been hexed. Prongs, it looks bad. We have to get her out of there before—"

"Mary wasn't in the castle when I left," Lily blurts out. "She was out here, playing Quidditch with someone."

"Merlin's hairy ballsack," Peter says.


	9. Tuesday (Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for some violence, some people being hexed, and some boys as animals beating each other up

“She’s my friend, Potter!”

“Evans, I don’t care, you have to go back to the castle!” James shouts.

“I am not abandoning her with you three!” Lily bellows back.

“I’ll take care of her, I promise, just it isn’t safe. I can’t help her and protect you too and you’re going to get yourself killed—or worse—“

“Who says I need protecting?” Lily spits.

“The great bloody wolf in the woods does,” James roars back. “Back me up here, Wormtail, come on!”

“Prongs, we’re wasting time,” Peter says shortly. “We have to get to her before he does.”

“Who is _he_?” Lily shouts.

“Nobody!” James and Peter yell this at the same time. James runs his hands through his hair, looking quite berserk.

“Fine, you know what? Fine. Just don’t you expect me to wait for you.” He throws up his hands and begins jogging across the lawn in his bare feet. Lily grips her wand and follows, Peter at her heels.

The forest is dark and cool; the bright pale moonlight wavers and distorts the patterns of dancing trees. James, apparently unbothered by the fact that he’s jogging through leaves and twigs in his bare feet, plunges on ahead.

“Where was she, Wormtail?” He calls. “Damn, where is Sirius when you need him…”

They hear another long, hollow howl that echoes through the trees. It’s hard to tell how far away it is. Lily’s blood feels icy in her veins. Peter’s shape next to her is twisting and shrinking and changing again, and the rat races across the moonlit path through the trees. For someone with bad eyesight, James seems to follow it very easily. It dashes back and forth from tree to tree, from patch of moonlight to patch of moonlight, almost faster than Lily’s eyes can follow.

They jog for another five minutes maybe, not much longer than that, then Peter is Peter again. “She was near here,” he says, glancing around. “There! Over there!”

Mary MacDonald is lying facedown in the leaves, her hair spilling out over her face. James and Lily race towards her, and Peter kneels down next to her, putting one hand against her neck.

“She’s got a pulse,” he says.

“Mary?” Lily says cautiously. No response. “I think she’s been Petrified,” Lily hisses. “Come on, help me roll her over.”

Together they roll Mary’s stiff figure over, and he’s right. Her eyes are moving frantically back and forth.

“ _Finite Incantatem_ ,” Lily gestures with her wand, feeling sick to her stomach, and Mary’s body relaxes. She struggles to sit up and doesn’t seem to be able to. Lily grabs her around the shoulders; Mary’s whole body is shivering and she’s taking huge, shuddering breaths.

“Mary,” James kneels in the leaves next to them. “What happened? Who hexed you?” His voice is gentler than Lily has ever heard it.

“I don’t know,” Mary gasps. She isn’t crying, but her voice is faint and scared. It’s unlike her. She laughs loud, she talks loud and she fights loud. She once got knocked off her broom in a Quidditch match and shattered her right wrist when she hit the ground, but got up and punched Dirk Cresswell, who had collided with her, in the face with her left before passing out. So, Lily thinks in horror, what happened to her? “He hurt me, Lily, he cursed me.”

“Who?” Lily says. “Mary, please?”

Mary manages to meet her eyes. Her face is deathly pale and her eyes are red-rimmed. “I think it was Mulciber,” she whispers, and then she faints heavily onto Lily’s shoulder.

Lily looks up to meet James’s eyes, and then Peter’s, red-hot fury rising in her chest. They’ve both gone very pale and a muscle is twitching in Peter’s neck.

“He’s evil,” Lily grates out. “Evil.”

James’s voice sounding strangled. “Sirius guessed Mulciber and Avery’ve have been taught to use Unforgivable Curses. Guess he was right.”

“We have to get her to Madame Pomfrey,” Lily says.

“We have to get her, and ourselves, out of here,” Peter says very sharply. “Now.”

“This is sick,” Lily manages. James nods, his right hand moving towards her shoulder like he means to comfort her.

“James, really,” Peter shouts. “We gotta go!”

“Right,” James stands and lifts Mary out of Lily’s arms. She had forgotten about Sirius and the wolf in the forest; suddenly, she’s painfully aware that there’s a great deal of growling and barking and snapping and it sounds quite close. The big black dog dashes suddenly into the clearing, elongating into Sirius Black midstride.

“I thought I smelled—what the fuck are you doing, Prongs? I thought you were going to take her back to the castle? Is that MacDonald?”

“Yeah,” Peter says. “She was hexed.”

“Well for Merlin’s sake GO!” Sirius yells. “We got distracted chasing some centaurs but we caught on to your scent and I assumed it was fine—he’s coming right this way!” And he runs back in the other direction, dropping to all fours and growing fur as he does so. He’s back a moment later, snapping at the heels of the wolf.

Lily gets what James meant when he said it was “sort of” a wolf. It has most of the requirements; four legs, bristling brown-black fur, bushy tail. But its snout is too long, its shoulders too broad. It has luminous golden eyes, gleaming teeth the size of steak knives and flashing silver claws. It rises up onto its hind legs like a man and howls, then drops to all fours and charges towards the dog, which is taller than it but much less stocky. They wrestle ferociously; it almost seems playful, but the dog is obviously trying to hold the wolf back from getting any closer, teeth flashing in the moonlight. The dog sinks its teeth into the thick fur around the wolf’s neck, and it roars, thrashing. It throws the dog off and fixes its huge, golden eyes on them. They’re sickeningly human, and they look familiar.

And suddenly James springs into action; without asking, he passes Mary’s unconscious body to Peter, who nods and catches Lily’s eye. She raises her wand and they take a few slow steps backwards, in the direction of the castle.

“Get ready to run,” James whispers. “Really run, Evans.” She nods. “Pete, get them both back inside. We’ll catch up to you.” And he turns and breaks into a run, right at the wolf.

“POTTER WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Lily screams, as the wolf surges forward, claws and huge, powerful muscles, but James is changing, too. His legs are stretching, and so is his neck, and fine brown hair is growing out of his back, and two sets of antlers erupt from his forehead.

And Lily thinks, _Prongs._

The stag charges into the wolf antlers first, knocking it several feet back and onto its side. Lily doesn’t stay to watch any more; she breaks into a run, zig-zagging in between trees towards the open lawn and the castle. She stops once to turn and look for Peter, who is slowed down by Mary, but steady. They make it to the back entrance together and Lily stops, lungs burning. Peter stops next to her a moment later, his face pink and his chest heaving. He pushes the front door of the castle open with his foot and maneuvers inside, setting Mary down on the cold stone floor. Lily illuminates her wand and is about to head towards the Hospital Wing when Peter grabs her hand. He glances along the wall at some of the portraits, and then whispers, “George!”

A portrait of a pointy-bearded ginger wizard, wearing a black hat and a magnificent ruff, jerks awake with a bit of a snort.

“Eh? Eh? Who’s there?”

“Down here!” Peter hisses. “It’s Pettigrew!”

“Oh of course, my fellow Saturn lover, there you are!” The portrait, George, has a very strong German accent. He leans forward to peer down at them. “What on earth have you got there, boy? Running around in the middle of the night with a couple of girls, what are you up to, eh?”

“George, there’s been a bit of trouble,” Peter says. “It’s bad, not just mischief. Can you go get Professor Dumbledore, please, and also Madame Pomfrey if you can find her? But the Headmaster first?”

“What’s this trouble, then?” The portrait asks.

“My friend’s been attacked!” Lily bursts out. “It’s really serious, please!”

“You’re the Gryffindor Prefect, am I right?”

“George, this is Lily Evans. She positively loves Saturn. Lily, this is George van Rheticus—he was a 16th century wizard astronomer, did groundbreaking research.” George sweeps off his hat and bows towards Lily. “Please, George, find Dumbledore and tell him Mary MacDonald’s been attacked.”

“Alright boy, but if this is one of your pranks I’ll force both of you to fill in a star chart, you hear!” And he vanishes, appearing in a portrait high above their heads, and then one closer to the Long Gallery.

“Bit of a nutter,” Peter whispers, “but he’s dead useful. Always willing to cover up for us in a pinch, as long as you show an appropriate interest in Astronomy. If he thinks you’re a scoundrel, he tests you on planetary movements.”

“Right,” Lily shrugs. She kneels down next to Mary, whose eyelids are fluttering erratically beneath her lids. She is distracted a few minutes later by heated shouting from outside; Peter sighs and rolls his eyes.

“I’ll stay, go on and break them up or they’ll go at it all night,” he says, sitting down next to Mary and supporting her head with his hands.

James and Sirius are standing on the front landing bellowing at each other.

“I know!” James has his hands on his hips, and blood is dripping onto his glasses from a nasty gash on his forehead. His feet are covered in mud, and he has sticks and twigs in his hair. “Look, I know that but this is just a little bit of an emergency, don’t you think?”

“And this isn’t?” The tattoo on Sirius’s thigh is definitely a lion, Lily sees now. She averts her eyes to his face, which is murderous, and the cuts on his ribcage, which look like clawmarks.

“Mulciber cursed her, Pads!” James shouts.

“I’m aware of that!” Sirius yells back. “But if I don’t head back right now, I’ll lose him!”

“He’ll chase centaurs all night.”

“He could wander into Hogsmede!”

“We can’t just leave her, come on!”

“Boys,” Lily tries to interject, “Peter asked some portrait named George to get Dumbledore…”

“So we’ve got to stick around until he gets here and we’re sure she’s alright!” James stabs his finger in Sirius’s direction. “We’ve got to!”

“I don’t have any pants on!” Sirius bellows.

“Tell him you were shagging someone in one of the greenhouses,” James snaps dismissively. “I don’t mean to be an arse about it Pads, but this is a little bit more important right now.”

“NOT TO ME,” Sirius roars, all the veins in his neck standing out. Lily jumps. James’s statement, which Lily sees as being pretty reasonable, given the circumstances, seems to have touched a nerve because Sirius takes a few menacing steps forward. “I AM NOT LEAVING HIM, JAMES! We promised him.” He takes a step back, breathing hard. “I promised him, and I’m not breaking any more promises to him. Not again.” His face is suddenly tired, and vulnerable, and very sad.

James reaches out and puts his hand on Sirius’s shoulder and they stare at each other for a minute. Something passes between them that Lily doesn’t really understand. People joke that Black and Potter are more brothers than friends, but the description has never seemed more accurate.

“Alright,” James says. “Go. I’ll find you, once Dumbledore gets here.”  And Sirius sprints off, changing into a dog as he goes. The three of them turn and slip back into the door and sit next to Mary and Peter, who is looking worried.

“Pads’ll track him down,” James says tiredly. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not,” Peter replies. Again this mysterious _him._ Doubts and suspicions and a half-formed theory rattle around in Lily’s brain.

“What’s he so angry about?” Lily asks quietly.

“It’s a long story,” James says, for the second time that night.

“Potter,” Lily warns.

“Now’s still not the time.” James dabs at the blood on his forehead. “Fuck. This is… fuck.

“It was only a matter of time before something like this happened,” Peter says. “Not for Mary, I mean. But—“

“Shh!” James stands up suddenly and so does Peter, looking towards the Gallery. There are voices coming from that direction, and footsteps. Peter draws his wand out and strides over to the portrait of George and taps it; “ _Lunctis viribus,_ ” he mutters, and the portrait swings inward, showing a dark, shadowy passage.

“Leads up to the Grand Staircase,” James says. “Best if we don’t get spotted by McGonagall, if you know what I mean.”

“How did you even find that?” Lily says, in wonderment and bewilderment and a little bit of annoyance.

“All sorts of things become possible when you can transform into a rat,” Peter says, stepping into the hole. Lily stares at them as they swing the portrait closed.

“And months of bloody research,” James adds. And then he smiles. “Impressed, Evans?”

“No,” Lily says. “Of course not.” She pauses. “Thank you,” she says. “For helping Mary. And for saving me from, from whatever you were doing out there.”

“No problem,” James says, and he swings the picture closed as Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall come into the hall.


	10. Wednesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this chapter is so short; the next tone is pretty long to compensate!

Lily insists on going to the Hospital Wing with Dumbledore and McGonagall, who levitates Mary’s body onto a stretcher and floats her up four flights of stairs.

“I found her in the hallway,” Lily fibs. “I had gotten up, I couldn’t sleep. Nervous about exams, I guess. I thought I walk might clear my head—I know I’m not supposed to, Professor, but it’s lucky I did because I heard commotion from the end of this hallway and I ran to see what it was, and Mary was lying by herself on the floor, Petrified.”

Dumbledore, who is in a long dark blue dressing gown and fluffy purple rabbit slippers, nods at her.

“It’s quite alright, Miss Evans,” he says. “I appreciate, this time, that you chose to take a midnight walk.”

“Did she say anything at all to you?” Professor McGonagall is wearing a tartan dressing gown and a very serious expression. Lily meets her eye.

“She said it was Mulciber, Professor. That was all, then she fainted.” McGonagall and Dumbledore exchange a look, but by now they’ve reached the Hospital Wing. Madame Pomfrey has apparently been warned by the portrait to expect them, because she’s bustling about and all the lights are on.

“Come in, come in,” she ushers the floating stretcher over to a bed in the empty wing, and she and McGonagall carefully lift Mary onto it. She stirs slightly. Pomfrey takes her pulse, gently lifts one of her eyelids.

“She’s in shock,” she announces. “And I’m sure she was hexed… you undid the hex, Miss Evans?”

“Yes,” Lily is hovering anxiously by the bed.

“Well, she’ll live,” Madame Pomfrey says. “She’ll need to rest for the night. I can give her something for any pain.”

“Poppy,” Dumbledore says quietly. “Miss MacDonald told Miss Evans she may have been attacked by another student. I am, of course, not sure of the curse, but I have my guesses, as I’m sure you do too.”

Madame Pomfrey’s eyes are cold. “She shows all the signs of being subjected to the Cruciatus Curse, Albus.”

“As I feared,” Dumbledore sighs. “Minerva, if you can escort Miss Evans back to the dormitory…”

“No!” Lily shouts, then catches herself. “I have to know if she’s going to be alright,” she pleads.

“She needs rest!” Madame Pomfrey says sternly. “And so, might I add, do you. You do have an exam in the morning, don’t you?”

“Please,” Lily says. “She’s my friend. Please.”

Madame Pomfrey considers her. “You may come back and check on her first thing in the morning, Miss Evans,” she says. “I do understand—must have caused you quite the fright, finding her, poor dear. You may come back before breakfast and see if she’s awake, if you like.”

“Thank you,” Lily says.

McGonagall walks her back to the portrait hole and opens it for her, then catches her arm. “Miss MacDonald is very lucky that you stumbled across her,” she says sternly. “But do try and avoid any further night wandering, Miss Evans.”

“Yes, Professor,” Lily says meekly, and climbs through the portrait hole. She drops into her bed almost immediately, and sleeps fretfully for a couple of hours.

Lily wakes around six and changes her clothes, then scribbles a note to Dorcas which she leaves at her bedside table, letting her know what’s happened. She slips out of the dorm and then out of the common room and heads back to the Hospital Wing.

Madame Pomfrey is up, and ushers her inside with a wave of her hand.

“She’s sleeping,” she says. “Peacefully enough. I’ve done what I can for now. I can do more when I know if anything else has been done to her. I don’t think it has, though.”

“Thank you,” Lily says, and takes a seat next to Mary’s bed. She’s curled up on herself on her side, looking very small.

“I have to run out,” Madame Pomfrey is slinging a cloak over her shoulders. “I’ll be back in a few moments, dear.”

“You’re leaving?” Lily says, startled. “You can’t just leave her here!”

Madame Pomfrey gives her a look that clearly says _You’re pushing your luck, Evans._ “Sorry,” Lily mutters. “I’m just worried, I guess.”

“Quite alright,” Madame Pomfrey strides towards the door. “I won’t be long.”

Lily rests her head on Mary’s bedsheets and lets her eyes droop closed; she’s resigning herself to the fact that she isn’t going to be fully conscious for her History of Magic exam in two hours and she doesn’t really remember anything about the International Warlock Convention of 1298. She’s trying, halfheartedly, to dredge something up out of her brain when Madame Pomfrey comes back into the room with her arms around a figure wrapped in a rather ragged cloak.

“We’ll get you lying down, almost there dear,” she’s saying in a soothing voice, “You’ve lost quite a bit of blood. I don’t know how you managed to do that to your own stomach, it hasn’t been this bad in quite a while…” and they vanish into a small back room, which clicks closed behind them. Lily remembers the not-quite-wolf, and wonders.

She drags herself reluctantly away from the bed and to her exam, not bothering to go down to breakfast. She sits in the front next to Dorcas, who looks over at her in alarm, her eyes rather bloodshot.

“I’ll explain later,” Lily hisses. “We’ll go up to see her once this is over.” Dorcas nods tightly.

The exam isn’t as bad as Lily had imagined, and she finishes it rather quickly, around the same time as James. He follows her out of the classroom and into the hallway, where Sirius is already waiting for them. Peter and Dorcas come out a few minutes later.

All three boys look exhausted. Peter’s hair is disheveled and he yawns widely and sighs. “Couldn’t remember a bloody thing about the Giant’s Rebellion in the 1440’s,” he mutters.

“I don’t even know what I wrote down,” Sirius snorts. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and he’s got a heavy white bandage rolled around his right arm and a few scratches on his face. There are dark rings under his eyes.

James looks even worse. The cut on his head that was bleeding last night has closed, probably with the help of a spell, but he’s got an enormous purpling bruise over his left eye that’s spread up his forehead.

“What on earth happened?” Dorcas rounds on Lily.

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” Lily summarizes, leaving out several signifigant pieces of information. “Pomfrey says she’s going to be alright, but I still want to go up and see her.”

“We do, too,” Peter says. And they troop off together.

When they get up to the Hospital Wing, Mary is awake, if bleary. She smiles wanly when she sees them, and they hurry to surround her bed.

“McGonagall and Dumbledore’ve already been in,” she says, as Dorcas grasps her hand. “They said that you found me in the Great Hall, Lily, but I know I was out on the Quidditch pitch. And I remember you lot, too. And the forest.”

“I may have, erm, fibbed a bit,” Lily says. “To keep us all from getting into even more trouble.”

“Don’t worry, I went with it,” Mary smiles wryly. She’s pale, but Lily can see a fire smoldering in her eyes.

“Do you remember what happened?” Lily says. Mary nods.

“Sure. I was out playing with a few kids on the Ravenclaw team—new broom, you know. Wanted to break it in. They left around a quarter to nine, and I flew for another half an hour, maybe. It was a nice night.”

Sirius snorts, and Lily smacks him in the knee.

“Anyway, I went to lock my broom up in the furthest shed, the one closest to the forest. I’d done that and I heard this horrible shrieking noise coming from the Whomping Willow. I can’t even explain it, it was awful. I walked over there to investigate and Mulciber appeared from among the trees. He chased me, and I ran. I’m a lot faster than he is so I thought I’d gotten away from him but he hit me with something from behind and knocked me over.”

“Fuck,” James mutters.

“And the rest is pretty much what you imagine,” Mary says. She closes her eyes. “He used the Crutiatus Curse on me, quite a bit. And he laughed about it, and he said I deserved it. And then he Petrified me and left me there.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Dorcas murmurs. Mary opens her eyes and glares at her.

“Yeah, I fucking know. He’s a monster. I’m going to make him pay for it,” she grates out, raising up both her hands, which are trembling. “I’m gonna strangle him.”

“Not if I do it first,” Sirius growls.

“Oh no, Black,” Mary snaps. “He’s mine.”

Lily takes her hand and grins rather violently. Good old Mary.

James gets up and is striding around the Wing restlessly. Peter chews on his thumbnail.

“Madame Pomfrey says I’ll be alright in a few days, physically,” Mary says. “I’ve arranged to take the rest of my exams next week if I’m up to it. I feel up to it now, mostly. I feel like I could wrestle a lion, that’s how angry I am.”

Behind them, Lily hears James whispering something to Madame Pomfrey, who replies, “No boys, he’s still asleep. He lost a lot of blood. Gauged himself in the stomach, somehow. Come back this evening, I suspect.” James turns around and runs both his hands over his face, then sits back down next to Mary’s bed.

“I’m glad it wasn’t worse,” he says.

“I’m glad you found me,” Mary smiles up at him. “Thank you, all of you.”

“Don’t you even mention it, MacDonald,” Sirius says.

“We’ve got our Herbology exam in twenty minutes,” Dorcas says, regretfully. “Sorry, Mary, we’ll be back tonight alright?”

Mary grasps her hand. “It’s fine. I’m off to sleep again, anyway. Good luck with the test, you all.”

Lily straightens the covers around Mary’s waist, and leaves reluctantly, her mind whirling.


	11. Wednesday (Again)

The Herbology exam consists of demonstrating the correct way to repot a Fanged Geranium. Lily feels she gets through it pretty well, considering she has 15 thousand different things on her mind. She heads back to the Hospital Wing when she finishes, but it’s empty and Mary is snoozing. Dorcas possibly has already come and gone. Lily sits down on a chair next to Mary’s bed, thanking her good sense to have studied for her exams very thoroughly the week before.

She’s sitting quietly, staring into space, when she hears a burst of laughter coming from the small back room. It’s pretty distinctive laughter, more like a bark. And then she places it; Sirius Black.

Lily stands and strides across the Hospital Wing and opens the door with determination at the same time that someone pushes on it from the other side. Lily steps forward at the same time the other person does, and she collides bodily with James Potter, whose glasses fly off.

“Bloody hell, Evans!” he barks, scooping them up. “Where’d you come from?”

“Where’d _you_ come from?” Lily tries to peer around him, and James steps in the way, blocking her line of sight.

“Nowhere,” he says. “Just, er, just having a bit of a sitdown.”

“In a closet?”

“Yes. Love a good closet, me.” Sirius’s distinctive laughter explodes from inside the room again.

“It’s alright, James,” says a tired, hoarse voice. “Let her in. From what you’ve told me, she deserves an explanation.”

James frowns, but steps out of the way to let Lily into the little room, and closes the door behind her.

The room is brightly lit because of late afternoon sun streaming through a large window, and contains a bed, a small bedside table and a few chairs. Peter is sitting on one of them, looking very anxious. Sirius is perched on the windowsill. And Remus Lupin is lying in the bed, with a textbook on his lap. Lily stares at him, in shock.

James and Sirius both look a little battered, but their bruises are scrapes are nothing when compared to how Remus looks. For a start, he looks exhausted. His face is thin and very pale, and he has enormous dark shadows, like bruises, beneath his eyes. There's a plaster over part of his chin, bandages wound around his left arm and another square, white bandage at the back of his neck. Lily remembers the big black dog, Sirius, Padfoot, sinking its teeth into the not-wolf’s neck. Remus’s eyes meet hers; they’re a warm brown, gold around the irises. And they are very, very familiar.

Something clicks in Lily’s head. Every little oddity she’s noticed about Remus over the years. His oddly-timed absences, often during the middle of the week. His scars. His timid, jerking fear, the first few months of school. His uncanny, almost frighteningly fast movements, despite the fact that he's shown no interest at all in athletics. Even smaller things that Lily had just filed away as facts and habits about Remus Lupin—the fact that he would never join his friends swimming when the weather got warm, his totally incompetency at potions (they keep wolfsbane in that room), his Boggart, which Lily remembers, is the full moon. It all makes sense now.

“Moony,” Lily whispers.

And Remus nods, jerkily, once.

Lily breathes out, heavily. And Sirius hops off the windowsill and strides over to stand directly next to Remus’s bed, putting his hand on his shoulder.

“You’ve got a problem with him, you’ve got a problem with us,” he says shortly. His grey eyes are cold and hard and challenging.

“I don’t have a problem with anyone, I just, are you alright?” Lily manages. Sirius relaxes slightly. “Only, that was you Madame Pomfrey brought in this morning, wasn’t it? She said you lost a lot of blood.”

Remus laughs, quietly. His voice, when he speaks, is hoarse. Lily remembers howling in the night. “I’ve looked worse, believe me,” he says. “I heal fast. I’d be fine if someone,” and he shoots a very dirty look at James, “hadn’t gored me in the side last night.”

“Really lived up to the name, though,” Peter says. “Prongs.”

James shrugs, sheepishly. “Sorry Moony,” he says. “Things got complicated.”

“So I’ve heard,” Remus replies. “I’m glad that Mary’s alright, and that I didn’t—“

“You didn’t,” Sirius says sharply.

“I know, Pads,” Remus says, almost consolingly. “Dumbledore knows,” he says to Lily. “So you don’t need to worry about that.”

Lily sits on an available chair. “I’m not worried,” she says. And she isn’t, surprisingly. A werewolf is a terribly fictional creature, but she saw it last night, and it didn’t hurt her. And she knows Remus, who is sarcastic and silly and studious and terrible at potions and afraid of heights. “I’m just… taking it in.” Remus’s mouth quirks a little at the corner, a silent _Thank you._ “But what was all the,” Lily falters, “the running around without pants and turning into animals?”

“You weren’t wearing pants?” Remus asks.

 “Moony,” Sirius says. “I never wear pants when I can help it.” Remus rolls his eyes.

“Pervert,” Peter says cheerfully. Sirius winks.

“Our stupid nicknames,” James says. “Not so stupid.”

“Arguably still stupid,” Peter says. “Coming from the bloke who got stuck with _Wormtail._ It’s dead useful, if you’re wondering, being able to turn into a rat. Not stupid at all. I’m great at getting in and out of places, it’s wonderful for sneaking into the kitchens. I can get out of all sorts of trouble really easily, too.”

“Except when it comes to Mrs. Norris,” Sirius snorts. Peter glares at him.

“And it’s great to explore the school.  I know more about Hogwarts that probably anyone. Nobody asks why there’s a rat in the corridor. They’d ask about a bloody great stag.”

“We don’t let James transform in the dorm anymore,” Remus says. “Not after what he did to Padfoot’s curtains.”

Lily feels like she’s sitting in on a meeting of a secret club. Which, she supposes, she is. She tries to get the conversation back on track, because all the boys, even Remus, seem giddy, even a little manic. “So you’re Animagi,” she says.

Sirius nods. “We managed it at the end of Fourth Year. Would have taken a lot less time with Moony’s help, but of course we couldn’t tell him. It was a bit of a surprise.” Remus smiles, sheepishly, from the bed.

“You were fourteen?” Lily splutters. “That’s, but it’s supposed to be horribly difficult. That’s amazing.”

“Not to brag,” James starts, and Sirius bursts into laughter. “Stuff it, Black!”

“Amazing but really, really illegal,” Lily says. “I mean, dying people’s robes weird colours and painting graffiti of lions eating snakes in the Great Hall and knicking butterbeer is one thing, but you could get sent to Azkaban for this.”

“We know,” James’s face is suddenly serious. “We didn’t do it on a whim—“ he’s cut off when the door swings open and Madame Pomphrey pokes her head in, carrying a tray with a bowl of soup and a suspicious-smelling goblet balanced on it..

“Alright lads,” she says, “visiting hours are over and I know you all have exams in the morning, so out.”

“It’s just Charms,” Sirius says dismissively.

“We won’t be in the way, honest,” Peter adds.

“Black, Potter, Pettigrew—out!” MadamePomphrey snaps, setting the tray down. “Miss Evans—sorry, didn’t see you there, you too. I do not want to see hide or hair of any of you in here until tomorrow, you understand? Remus dear, how are you feeling?”

“Much better, thanks,” Remus says.

“Why are we Black, Potter and Pettigrew and he’s Remus Dear?” Peter mutters, but he stands and files out the door behind James and Sirius. Lily goes too, and they peer at Mary as they troop out of the Hospital Wing. She’s asleep again.

Outside the door, Sirius grins and holds out his hand. James rolls his eyes. “Twat,” he says, but roots around in his bag and pulls out a long, heavy-looking length of fabric. Sirius swings it around his shoulders and immediately vanishes. “Bring it back in one piece,” James mutters towards the empty air. “And don’t get caught.” Lily hears Sirius’s laughter, and the door to the Hospital Wing swings back open again, then closed.

“I’m going to meet my girlfriend,” Peter says. “I haven’t seen her in days.”

“Alright mate,” James slaps Peter on the shoulder. “Have fun.” And Peter strides away. And it’s just Lily and James. They stare at each other for a minute and then James’s stomach growls, loudly. “Er,” James says. “Skipped dinner.”

“Yeah, me too,” Lily sighs.

“Oh, right,” James is suddenly sheepish. “I don’t suppose—I mean, if you’re hungry we could go grab something.”

“Dinner’s been over for hours,” Lily says sadly.

“Evans,” James grins suddenly. “I know where the kitchens are.”

“Oh, right. Obviously,” Lily says.

The kitchens are directly under the Great Hall, down the hallway that heads to the Hufflepuff common room. Lily follows James along the corridor until he stops in front of a large painting of a bowl of fruit. He reaches out a tickles the large green pear, which giggles and then transforms into a doorknob. The door opens on an enormous, warm room with high ceilings and many stoves and countertops. And it’s filled with House Elves, apparently cleaning up what is left of dinner.

“You don’t actually knick food, do you?” Lily asks. “They just give it to you, don’t they?” James shrugs sheepishly.

“They keep my secrets,” he smiles around at the House Elves, several of who wave and greet him as _Master Potter._ Lily snorts.

“I’m sure this is normal for you, a small army to cook you dinner,” Lily sits down across from James at a table and digs into the steak and kidney pie an elf had whisked in front of them. “But it never ceases to amaze me. And bother me, too.”

“No,” James is shoveling mouthfuls of pie into his mouth happily. “My mum grew up with them as a kid, but we never had them at home.”

“You actually did chores?” Lily raises an eyebrow.

“Well, I was supposed to,” James says. “That doesn’t mean I ever actually followed through with it.”

They eat in silence for a few minutes. A house elf brings Lily tea, and she takes it and offers her thanks. The house elf bows and scurries away. Lily sips it, thinking that there are some aspects of Wizarding society that she’ll never really understand.

“Do you think Mulciber will be expelled?” James says suddenly.

“He has to be,” Lily says. “If the school can prove it was the Cruciatus Curse.” She frowns at her teacup for a minute. “What did you mean when you said Sirius thought Mulciber and Avery had been taught to use Unforgivables? And when Peter said he thought it was only a matter of time?”

James frowns, rubbing at his nose underneath his glasses. “It’s just a guess,” he says. “We don’t have any proof, though I suppose this could change that, if the Ministry gets involved. I already wrote to my dad and told him about it, and he’s concerned.”

“Were you expecting Mulciber to attack Mary?” Lily asks, alarmed.

“No. Well, not specifically.” Outside of last night, this is the most serious Lily has ever seen him. “But we’ve been expecting someone in that group to do something like this. I think it’s like an initiation.”

“An initiation?” Lily stares at him. “That sounds a little paranoid, Potter. The Slytherins aren’t in a secret society.”

“Not all of them, no. And it’s not just Slytherins, though Mulciber’s cruel enough and smart enough to be the kind of people they’d want.”

“Who’d want?”

“Death Eaters,” James barks out. “Voldemort.”

Lily rolls her eyes. “Potter, Death Eaters don’t want to recruit schoolchildren,” she says. The name has been tossed around a lot lately, mostly in connection with the recent Muggle killings. “And the Prophet says they’re just a fringe group of the Knights of Walpurgis, and not dangerous.”

“The Prophet publishes what the Minister of Magic wants,” James points out, and Lily sighs because it’s true. “The Ministry doesn’t want people to be worried about something that they don’t know anything about, and they know basically nothing about the Death Eaters. My dad’s in charge of the investigation, Evans. They don’t know who Voldemort is, or what he wants. All they know that people in very weird masks have been attacking Muggles.”

“Then how do you know any of this?” Lily snaps.

“I told you,” James says adamantly. “I don’t know for sure. But I do know who a few of the Death Eaters are. Or Sirius does.” Lily puts a few things together in her head.

“His family,” she whispers. James nods.

“Specifically his cousin Bellatrix, and her husband. Both Lestranges, really. He heard them talking about it over summer. Bellatrix was telling Sirius’s brother he should join, but he needed to prove himself first.”

Lily thinks of some of the things she’s heard about Sirius’s family, and Sirius’s own fight with his brother in the hallway, and nods. “That’s why he left.”

“I think so,” James says. “He hasn’t really talked about it. But anyway,” he shakes his head. “We think, and my dad agrees with us, that the Lestranges and people like Malfoy are teaching dark magic to kids they think might want to be Death Eaters and then encouraging them to, er, try them out.”

“And Mary pissed Mulciber off, so he decided to get even,” Lily, feeling sick to her stomach all of a sudden, drinks more tea.

“I think it’s been going on for a while,” James nods. “But never on this scale. Little stuff, disguised as pranks.”

“But this has gone beyond that.” 

“Yeah,” James agrees. “Which means that you need to be careful.”

“Me?”

“Everyone, really. I mean, I’m sure they’d love to target me or Sirius. Sirius especially. But you’re Muggleborn and you intimidate them and you pissed off Snape.”

Lily sighs. She should have known the conversation would come around to this. “Snape won’t do anything to me,” she says. “He’s an idiot and has interests that concern me, but he’d never intentionally hurt anyone.”

“Are we talking about the same Snape?” James snorts. “Because I have known him to intentionally hurt people. Me, for one. Remus.” He stops himself short and makes a big show of drinking his pumpkin juice.

“What does Lupin have to do with this?”

“Nothing. The fact still remains that he keeps dangerous company.”

“Potter,” Lily says decisively. “I don’t want to have this conversation anymore.”

“I’m just trying—“

“Potter.” Lily adopts her Look. James shuts his mouth. She stands up with the realization that there are still exams tomorrow, that she still has to prepare for them, that the world is continuing on around this strange and scary series of events.

“I—“ James says from behind her. Lily turns around to frown at him. “Sorry,” he says and winces. “Merlin. We very nearly went a whole conversation without getting into an argument.”

Despite herself, Lily laughs. “It’s okay,” she says.  She turns to go and then pauses with one more thing on her mind.

“You did that for him, didn’t you?” she says. James’s left eyebrow goes up. “Becoming Animagi, I mean. It wasn’t just something you decided to do because you can, or to get into trouble. You did it for Remus. To help him.”

“Yeah,” James says. “Pretty daft, I know.”

“No,” Lily shakes her head. “I think it was pretty brave.” And she turns and leaves the kitchen, leaving James sitting by himself at the table. 


	12. Thursday

On Thursday morning, the Ministry comes to Hogwarts.

It isn’t technically the first thing that happens Thursday morning. Despite the fact that the Potions and Transfiguration exams are arguably the two hardest, Lily had tossed and turned all night and Dorcas had shaken her awake ten minutes after breakfast had started. They head downstairs together, Lily half-heartedly tugging her hair back into a braid in the hopes that nobody will look too closely.

The news of the attack in the Forest has spread quickly around the school, as news usually does. Lily overhears about seven different versions of the story as she eats, including one over-dramatic tale involving a dragon and a herd of centaurs from two small Gryffindor girls to her right. They look very anxious, so Dorcas leans over to assure them that there are no dragons anywhere near Hogwarts.  The stories all seem to have one thing in common, and that is that Lily, James, Sirius and Peter were involved somehow; all across the hall heads are turning in her direction. Lily sighs, and keeps her head down as she eats her toast. She shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s unnecessarily callous to gossip about an attack on somebody’s life. She forces herself to finish the toast, which is suddenly very unappealing, and mentally reviews Golpalott’s Third Law. They leave before breakfast is over, and Lily intends to walk back up to Gryffindor tower to wash her face and brush her hair properly when she turns a corner out of the Great Hall to find Mulciber and Rosier blocking her way. They are wearing almost identical ugly sneers.

“Lily Evans,” Mulciber says. His mouth twists as he says her name, and it makes Lily want to vomit. “Quite the little hero, aren’t you.”

“Get out of my way,” Lily snaps, crossing her arms. Behind her, Dorcas’s hand snakes towards her pocket and her wand.

“Why should we?” Rosier is tall, but he looks tiny next to Mulciber. “We want to have a word, Evans.”

“You’re toeing a line,” Mulciber continues. “Messing with stuff you do not want to mess with. People you do not want to make angry. You’ve made me pretty angry.”

“Well,” Lily’s heart is beating very hard in her chest; she’s furious at herself that she’s scared, but she is. She makes herself square her shoulders. “Luckily for me I don’t think you’ll be attending Hogwarts for very much longer. Now move.”

“What are you gonna do? Give me detention? Report me to a professor? Hex me?” Mulciber pulls his wand out of his pocket, and so does Rosier, and so does Dorcas. The tip of Rosier’s wand is pointed towards Dorcas, and Dorcas’s directly at Rosier’s head. Lily keeps her arms crossed over her chest.

“You won’t hex me in the middle of the hallway,” she says, and shrugs a shoulder at the doorway to the Great Hall, and the handful of people who have gathered behind them, wondering what the holdup is. “You got the jump on Mary, in the woods at night be herself. You don’t stand a chance here, Mulciber.”

“You filty little Mudblood—“

“Yeah,” Lily sighs. Always that word as an insult, nothing original. As if she’s expected to feel guilty about it. “I’m not ashamed of what I am,” she says, surprising herself. “You should be. Better a Mudblood than a monster. Now, get out of my way.”

“Make me,” Mulciber snarls, and Lily decides that this has gone on far enough. She moves her hand towards her pocket like she’s going for her wand and Mulciber takes a step forward, opening his mouth. Before he can begin to speak, Lily slaps him. It has the desired effect; Mulciber is so startled that he stumbles backwards into Rosier, knocking him over. His wand lowers, and Lily jumps forward again and knees him as hard as she can in the groin. Mulciber doubles over with a howl, and Lily shoves past him into the hallway beyond.

She stops short at the crowd of 12 or so first year Hufflepuffs, staring at her with alarm in their eyes.

“Er,” Lily says, and smoothes her hair out of her face. “Important thing to remember about purebloods. They might know more magic than you, the first year, but they’re never going to get used to getting punched in the face.” And she hurries away before a teacher can leave breakfast to investigate.

“Lily, I love you,” Dorcas says as they head down the hall. “But you’re really bloody scary sometimes.”

It was a stupid thing to do, Lily berates herself as she climbs the stairs back to Gryffindor tower. Stupid, and rash, and it’s only going to lead to more trouble. It was a very James Potter thing to do.

It felt good.

When Lily and Dorcas arrive in the Transfiguration classroom ten minutes later, Sirius, Remus, James and Peter all stand at once and salute her. James grins in a rather dangerous way, and Sirius winks.

“Knock it off you lot,” Lily flaps her hand at them, and they burst out laughing before sitting down again. Rather pink in the face, Lily sits too.

“The whole school’s gone mad,” Dorcas says.

“I don’t know, and I do not want to know,” Professor McGonagall declares from the front of the class, and they quiet down to begin her exam. It’s not an easy one, but it kicks Lily’s brain into gear. It feels good to focus entirely on the theory behind nonverbal magic for a few hours, without anything else to distract her. When she leaves the exam she feels much more level-headed, and much more like herself. Nothing like a difficult test to restore normality.

It doesn’t last. They leave the exam and head towards the Great Hall for lunch, and as Lily and Dorcas are trying to push through a crowd of second years leaving their Charms exam Amelia runs up to them, looking out of breath. Her hair is disheveled and she looks frantic; exam weeks are never particularly easy on her but she definitely looks more alarmed than usual.

“What’s happened, what’s wrong?” Dorcas asks quickly.

“There are Aurors in the entrance hall,” Amelia says. “Three of them. They just arrived. I saw them when I was leaving my Ancient Runes test. They’ve got to be here for Mulciber, right?”

“Oh, shit,” Lily says, and they hurry towards the entrance.

Dumbledore and Professor Slughorn are standing in the front hallway talking to the Aurors, a man and two women. Dumbledore has a very serious expression on his face, and Slughorn is chewing at his lip and talking very fast. Lily, Dorcas and Amelia peer around the corner into the entrance hall to get a better look, but any words are lost in the noise of student coming in for lunch. Dumbledore heads off towards the staircase upstairs, and as he passes Lily catches part of what he and Slughorn are saying.

“Mister Mulciber has been in my office since after breakfast,” Slughorn is wringing his hands as he walks. Lily likes him despite his blustering and pompous manner, but he isn’t really equipped to deal with something like this. That explains why Mulciber was out wandering around in the morning, too. Lily suspects Dumbledore had to push to get him involved. “I really can’t imagine something like this happening, it really is unbelievable—“

“Of course, Horace, of course,” says the tallest Auror, a dark-haired woman. “We will try to disrupt your house as little as possible, but there may be several interviews we need to conduct.”

“Miss McDonald has agreed to speak with you,” Dumbledore’s voice grows faint as they reach the stairs and start up them. “She is feeling much better and—“ it trails off, and Lily turns to frown and Dorcas and Amelia.

“Poor Mary,” Dorcas says quietly. “I’m sure they’ll be nice to her, but I can’t imagine being interviewed by Aurors like that. They scare me.”

“Your mum is one, Dorcas,” Amelia says.

“They scare me,” Dorcas repeats fervently. Lily snorts, and together they head back towards the Great Hall and lunch, Amelia joining them at their table. Lily is halfway through her sandwich, mostly tuning out the chatter from the table around her (mostly about the presence of the Aurors in the school, though James, Peter, Frank and Kingsley are talking in depth about the Quidditch’s superiority to Muggle football at the other end of the table) when Dorcas grabs at Lily’s arm, making her drop her sandwich facedown on the table.

“What was—“ Lily starts, but Dorcas shushes her and points to the other end of the table. Sirius is in the process of stuffing two apples and half a sandwich into the pockets of his robes; he finishes his sentence as he turns towards away from James and Peter and towards Lily and Dorcas.

“—finish studying, you know, so I’m nicking some food. Don’t tell Madame Pince we’ll be eating in her library mates, all right?”

“Like you’re actually going to get any studying done,” Peter calls, and Sirius chuckles as he walks away from the table.

“Come on,” Dorcas hisses, hopping out of her seat and tugging at Lily’s arm.

“Come—Dorcas, what—“

“You’ve still got a bet on with him, don’t you?” Amelia has a scarily determined look on her face. It makes Lily nervous.

“Yes, I guess, but it isn’t exactly the first thing on my mind right now.”

“It would cheer Mary up if we caught him and won,” Dorcas’s voice is wheedling, and she blinks up at Lily with determined charm.

“You’re right,” Lily sighs, and stuffs two more bites of sandwich into her mouth. Amelia and Dorcas grin, and drag her out of the Great Hall.

The library is three floors above them; Lily, Dorcas and Amelia hurry up the same stairs Sirius took. He’s wearing heavy boots with his robes and his footsteps are very distinctive, as is his whistling, which is perfectly on-key. Dorcas has one of Lily’s hands and Amelia have the other, and they despite the fact that the corridor and staircase are completely empty, they keep shushing each other and winking conspiratorially. Amelia is even tiptoeing.

“Do you want him to think you’re up to something?” Lily sighs. “What if he turns around and sees us—you might as well hold a sign over your head that says I’M SPYING ON YOU.” Her voice echoes a little in the stairwell and she claps a hand over her mouth and grins apologetically. “Fine, you might have a point.”

“Stop complaining and come on,” Dorcas says, and they hurry up the stairs and towards the library.

Lily has spent considerably less time in the library this week than she has any other exam week, but even so she knows that this close to summer vacation it’s bound to be practically empty. It’s wonderful on cold or blustery days, warm and cluttered and dusty, but when its warm outside like it is today it feel s stuffy and oppressive. The library isn’t a very popular place on beautiful sunny lunchtimes, which makes it a perfect spot to have a snog. Lily thinks idly that the idea sounds nice, then rolls her eyes at herself. Dust. Dust everywhere.

Sirius is sauntering around some bookshelves towards the encyclopedias when they reach the library doors. Madame Pince glances up at them as they shuffle through the doorway and raises a stern eyebrow.

“There isn’t anyone else in here, is there?” Amelia asks, obviously hopefully Pince will give the secret away for them.

“It’s a library, it is a public space,” Pince says sharply. “Keep your voices down.” And she slams a book closed, lifting a cloud of dust.

“Why would you become a librarian at a school if you hate kids?” Dorcas mutters as they turn away towards the encyclopedias. It’s a question they’ve been asking for years, a running joke, so Lily doesn’t bother to answer. Sirius’s footsteps have slowed as he reaches the back wall of the library, lined with old scarred wooden desks. Their view is blocked by a bookshelf, but Lily hears him throw himself into a chair.

“Brought you lunch,” he says, “don’t tell Pince. Oh, don’t give me that look. It’s your favorite sandwich, I made it myself. You can pay me back later with—OW!” There’s a muffled thump; someone has hit Sirius over the head with a heavy object, probably a book. Amelia turns to Lily and grins up at her, looking diabolically delighted. Before Lily can stop her, she jumps out from around the bookshelf and right into Sirius’s line of sight.

“Ha gotcha!” Amelia shouts, then, “Oh.”

“Um,” says Remus Lupin’s voice. “Yes. You’ve found me. In the library. My cover is blown. Oh, horror.”

“God damn it,” Lily sighs, and hauls Dorcas around the bookshelf too. Amelia’s face is bright red, and both Sirius and Remus are staring at them. Remus has his potions textbook in front of him on the desk, and has raised one eyebrow in what may be the most exasperated expression Lily has ever seen. Remus Lupin can do exasperated in his sleep, and when he tries it’s very good. She feels herself blushing.

“Lily,” Sirius, on the other hand, just looks wicked and a slow grin is unfurling across his face. “Did you three follow me?”

“No,” Dorcas starts, but Lily interrupts her.

“Yes,” she says, deciding that it’s best to be honest and they already look like idiots so she can’t do any more damage. “Sorry. We still have a bet on, you know. Had to give it a shot.”

“And a guy can’t bring his mate lunch in the library without arousing suspicion?” Sirius’s grin has stopped simply being huge and is quickly entering the realm of shit-eating. “I know I’m dashing and irresistible but c’mon Evans, really.”

“Yes, thanks,” Lily has the sinking suspicious she won’t hear the end of this for a while. “Sorry to bother you, I’ll let you study.” And she turns to go, hoping Amelia and Dorcas will follow her.

Dorcas does not. “It’s Marlene McKinnon, isn’t it?” She asks breathlessly. “That’s who you’re dating.”

Sirius and Remus blink at her, and then Sirius lets out a huge, barking laugh. From the other side of the library, Madame Pince hisses at him to keep his voice down. Remus drops his head onto his book, his shoulders quivering with laughter.

“I am too fucking tired for this,” he manages. “I need to study.”

“Merlin’s unwashed knickers,” Sirius gasps, like this is the funniest thing he’s ever heard in his life. “Marlene? Me? She’d eat me for lunch, Meadowes.”

“Never mind then,” Dorcas mutters.

“That’s the best you got? Marlene? You stalk me all the way to the library to ask me if I’m snogging Marlene McKinnon?”

“Apparently,” Lily grabs at Dorcas, and hauls all three of them out of the library, leaving Sirius and Remus sniggering in their wake. Lily stomps her way back to the Great Hall, and twenty minutes later throws herself into her seat for their potions exam. Slughorn draws back a little when he sets the test in front of her, and James, sitting two seats down from her, goes to open his mouth and stops abruptly when Lily glares at him.

“I don’t envy your exam right now,” he says, before Slughorn hushes them all.  

Lily doesn’t either; she finishes it in a half an hour before anybody else does, and smugly drops her test off at Slughorn’s desk before exiting the room. With the afternoon free, she heads out towards the front gates to wait for everyone else to finish. Sitting by herself on the front steps of the castle with a light wind down her back and the forest and lake stretched out in front of her like a painting, Lily suddenly feels like crying. It has something to do with how picturesque the view of Hogwarts looks, how still and perfect everything seems to be. There are a group of kids finishing their Care of Magical Creatures exam at the edge of the lake, and Hagrid is sitting outside of his house in the distance with smoke curling from the chimney. The steps are warm underneath her legs and the air smells like honeysuckle and wood smoke and its magical, so still and quiet, like a drawing pulled right from a fairy tale and made real.

When Lily was little, really little, before she knew she was a witch, she had always dreamed that the things she read about in books would come true for her. That she’d wake up and find out she was the lost heir to a magical, faraway place where nothing bad could ever possibly happen, where sisters didn’t tell you that you were a freak and parents never died.

When she had gotten the letter from Hogwarts, real concrete proof that she was special, Lily had believed her dreams had come true. Magic. Witchcraft. A castle, right out of a fairy tale.

But that wasn’t the case, was it? Lily got all the things fairy tales never mentioned; people who hated her for something she couldn’t change about herself, a childhood friend who sided with them, a ruined relationship with a sister she couldn’t help but caring about. Hogwarts was supposed to be safe, untouchable. It almost always had been before.

James is right, Lily thinks. What had happened with Mary was bad, but something worse is coming. And she can’t stay at Hogwarts forever.

“Lily,” a voice from behind her shakes her out of her thoughts. She wipes hurriedly at her eyes, though she hasn’t really cried. They feel prickly and tired. Snape is standing at the top of the steps, looking at her.

“What?” Lily says, crossing her arms over her chest. He looked at his feet.

“Mulciber’s been expelled,” he says. His face is unreadable. It’s a strange feeling, being unable to tell what he’s thinking, because they used to know each other so well. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Good,”Lily snaps viciously. “He deserves it.”

“I never said he didn’t,” Snape says. They stare at each other. Lily knows what she needs to ask him, but it’s hard. The question sits on the tip of her tongue and she forces it forward.

“Sev—“ she says, and he looks up. “You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you? You didn’t know Mulciber was going to attack Mary?”

“No,” Snape says, his eyes hard but his voice earnest. “No. I promise, Lily.”

Lily doesn’t know if she should believe him, but she decides, for now, she will. She needed to hear it.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” And she picks up her school bag and brushes past him to go back inside.

The common room is noisy, filled with students obviously relieved to be one day closer to summer. Lily picks a seat by the window in one corner rather than going upstairs. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone but it feels good to be surrounded by chattering first and second years, bubbling with excitement and shouting their summer plans at each other. When she looks at them she can see herself at age eleven, scared and excited and determined and so small.

Peter, Remus, Sirius and James tumble in through the portrait hole a few minutes later and dump themselves into their usual seat, a few chairs away from her. Lily catches the tail end of their conversation.

“Thank god that’s over,” Remus is saying. He still has huge rings under his eyes, and his movements look stiff and tired. “I studied, I cried, I sacrificed a few goats to the god of passing potions. There’s nothing more for it. I’ve done all I can.”

“Messy, those goats. Clean the blood out of the bedsheets, will you Moony?” Sirius says.

“Don’t want to upset your delicate and aristocratic stomach, Pads?”

“Just tomorrow left,” Peter says over them. “And then it’s done. I can’t wait. It’s been a weird, weird year.”

Lily thinks about her sister’s engagement and how her father didn’t know whether to smile or cry, and Snape’s face twisting as he says the word _Mudblood,_ and Sirius punching Regulus in the stomach, werewolf claws in the middle of the night, her fingers on James Potter’s bare shoulder as they hid behind the Quidditch shed, and Mary lying in a hospital bed upstairs.

No fucking kidding, she thinks. No fucking kidding. 


	13. Friday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some shouting and strong words towards the end, be warned

Mary is released from the hospital wing that afternoon during their very last exam, so when Lily and Dorcas return to their room she’s sitting on her bed waiting for them.

“I’ve decided to stay and finish my exams,” Mary says as they pile onto her bed. “I’m already prepared for most of them, and it feels a bit like they’re winning if I let it get to me, you know? And they’ve expelled Mulciber anyway.” She launches into a story of her interview with the Aurors the day before, and Lily crosses her feet under her and lets out a deep breath.

She knew Mary was going to be okay, but it’s a different level of relief to see her back in her room. Relief floods through Lily’s body, combined with excitement that their tests are finally over and a long, empty week is stretched before her. They had gone up to visit her the evening before after dinner, but their room had been far too quiet that night and Lily hadn’t slept well again. The absence of Mary’s heavy breathing in the bed next to hers was palpable; getting dressed that morning Lily had mused that she had hardly ever slept alone in a room. She and Petunia had shared a room, and then she had come to school. Even when she was home she could hear her dad snoring from the bedroom next door. Dorcas slept quietly and soundly, like a rock. It was a silly thing to get worked up about, but Lily had missed the snoring.

“And it’ll be nice because I can take the rest of my tests in peace, because the only thing that’ll happen next week other than getting our scores back is Dumbledore will announce who’s Head Girl!” Mary finishes a good ten minutes later. Lily had been very relieved to hear she had skimmed over the details of where she had been found or James, Sirius and Peter’s involvement, and seemed to have been truly unconscious for the hairier events of that night.

“I almost forgot about that,” Lily tries to sound nonchalant.

“You did not,” Dorcas rolls her eyes. Lily honestly almost had forgotten with everything that had happened;  it certainly was not the first thing on her mind until Mary mentions it.

“Not now, no,” Lily says. “Now it’s definitely on my mind.”

“We’ve been over this,” Mary says, and it feels a little like the last week hasn’t happened and they’re picking up one of the many conversations they had on the topic. “It’ll be you and Remus, probably.”

“But definitely you.”

“Yeah, definitely you. There literally isn’t anyone else Dumbledore would pick! You’re on top.”

“Stop you’ll jinx it! Then Dumbledore will pick Moaning Myrtle over me,” Lily snorts.

“Can you imagine? Why won’t anyone _listen to me,_ can’t see why they’d want to listen to _pimply sad Myrtle who can’t even wear her badge because she’s DEAD!”_ Mary wails in her best Myrtle impersonation. A minute later someone bangs on their door and shouts, “GO OUTSIDE!” They burst out laughing, and Dorcas buries her face in the pillows to smother her giggles.

They do go outside not long afterwards, shedding their cloaks and kicking their shoes off to sit in the sun under a tree. The lawn is littered with students, most with their cloaks and shoes off, and there is a distinct lack of bookbags; everyone looks relieved the week is finished. Amelia and Alice and Frank and Kingsley Shacklebolt join them, and because Frank and Kingsley are sitting with them James, Peter, Sirius and Remus flop down a few minutes later, Sirius giving Mary a huge high five before sprawling onto the warm grass in a very dog-like manner. Remus winces as he slides his bookbag over his head and drops it into Lily’s lap. Piles of old parchment and three books scatter across the grass, and Remus, still standing, sighs heavily.

“The universe is laughing at me,” he says.

“Oh it’s not that bad Moony,” Peter starts picking up paper, and Lily scoops the books up. They’re library books, and the one on the top of the pile reads _Historic Uses of the Humonculous Charm._ “At least we’re done with classes, so it’s not all bad!”

“Why are you reading this?” Lily flips open the book and the language inside is mostly unintelligible. She isn’t really sure what the humonculous charm is, let alone why it’s historic uses could matter.

“Looked interesting,” Remus accepts the papers from Peter and sits down heavily next to Sirius on the grass.

“Really? It looks awful.”

“He’s not kidding when he says he’s a joke,” James ruffles Remus’s hair. “That’s fun for him."

“It’s true,” Remus laments. “I have to make up for the fact that I’ve got no money and no sense of humour and no muscle tone somehow. I’m witty and I read big books for fun. ”

“A big hairy wet blanket.”

“A fucking disaster.”

“And you’ve got a big nose.”

“Yes, thank you, Pads, but at least I don’t pluck my eyebrows.”

“You weren’t supposed to tell anyone that!”

“Anyway,” James leans over, shoving his hand in Sirius’s face to muffle his outrage. “Party tonight? Common room? Celebrate the end of term? We’ll get drunk and Sirius’ll wake up with a lampshade on his head again?”

“As long as he doesn’t wake up on my bedroom floor again,” Kingsley says.

“No promises, mate.”

“We can celebrate you being out of the hospital wing too MacDonald. That’s a cause to party if I’ve ever heard one. Alice and Amelia are invited, of course,” James continues.

“Alright, alright, I consent,” Mary winks.

“Evans? You can’t say it’s not for a good cause—“ James is wheedling, which he is quite good at when he puts his mind to it.

“I may make an appearance,” Lily says. “As long as you don’t ask me to help clean up.”

“Never,” James promises. “Though you could run down to the kitchens in an hour or so to get some snacks. Sirius and Pete and I have an errand to—“

“—to undisclosed locations to gather undisclosed materials that you are definitely not talking about in front of a prefect—“ Remus interrupts.

“Right. An errand to pick up streamers. For our party. Streamers. Obviously.”

“Streamers,” Lily says. “Right. Of course. I’ll retrieve snacks, but I’m going to ruin your reputation as the great Gryffindor provider.”

“Please, deflate his head as much as you can,” Peter says resolutely, and Lily laughs.

Peter and Remus already have actual streamers it seems, and an hour later they drag everybody upstairs to help them decorate the common room. They’re red and gold and glittery, and Sirius somehow talks Kingsley and Dorcas into getting up onto tables to string them up and then leaves with Remus, Peter and James a few minutes later to acquire alcohol. Lily doesn’t ask where from; unlike the food from the kitchens she’s relatively sure they’re breaking some school rules but she can’t find it in her to care. At least they’re sharing. Earlier in the year she had decided she wanted to put her foot down about it, and had refused to let Sirius bring bottles of firewhisky to the party they threw after the first Quidditch game. He’d run upstairs and returned with three very dusty bottles of cognac, and the entire house had spent the next day puking up alcohol that was probably more expensive than the car Lily’s dad drove.

It’s better not to be there when they return though, Lily reasons, and heads off down to the kitchens to pick up some snacks. The hallways are almost completely empty except for a few Hufflepuffs on their way outside, so it’s not difficult to slip into the kitchens. Lily leaves ten minutes later laden down with cakes and cookies in a basket helpfully provided to her by the house elves. She’s heading up an empty hallway, warmly illuminated by the afternoon sun streaming through the windows, when she hears footsteps on the stone floors behind her. James’s voice telling her to be careful comes unnecessarily to mind. Annoyed at herself, Lily hoists the basket full of cookies and glances behind her.

Snape is turning the corner that Lily herself just came around. She doesn’t remember seeing him anywhere near the kitchen, but there are a number of side corridors and rooms he could have come out of between there are here.

“Lily,” he says.

“Um,” Lily doesn’t really want to talk to him, or be in the same hallways as him, really. “Sorry. I’m in a bit of a hurry. End of term party to get ready for.” She gestures with the basket. “What do you want?”

“I wanted—er—“ Snape takes another few steps towards her and clears his throat. He’s working up to something, some big declaration, and Lily doesn’t want to hear it.

“Look—“ she starts, and then something, someone, comes flying around the corridor behind Snape. At first Lily thinks it’s one of the Hufflepuffs playing around in the empty hallway, and then the figure slams purposefully into Snape, throwing him sideways into the wall. It’s James. Lily shouldn’t even be surprised at this point.

Snape snarls at James, who is red in the face, and shoves him with his shoulder in the ribcage. James’s elbow lashes out and Snape doubles over, and in the process goes for his wand. By the time it’s in his hand James’s is too, and both of them are breathing hard and glaring at each other. Snape starts to move his hand and Lily decides this has gone on enough.

“ _Expelliarmus!”_ She shouts, and Snape’s wand pops out of his hand and clatters to the floor. “What,” Lily strides towards them, and both James and Snape turn to look at her with fear on their faces, “in God’s name is going on here?”

“He was going—“ James starts.

“I wasn’t doing—“ Snape shouts over him.

“—hexing people, I’m sure of it—“

“—just jumped on me like the Gryffindor coward he is—“

“SHUT UP!” Lily roars. They do. “Potter,” Lily says as calmly as she can, “did you follow me down here?”

“No!” James flushes and looks furious about it. “Well, yes, but not originally alright? We were heading out and I saw you and then I saw Snape and it seemed weird so I followed him, and—“

“—And then he assaulted me out of nowhere!” Snape interjects. He is ignored.

“You asked me to come down here alone,” Lily says.

“Yes well,” James’s face is turning redder but he meets Lily’s eyes. “I was too busy flirting with you to think it through alright? But this is what I was trying to tell you in the kitchens the other night—I think he wants to be one of them and I think—“

“I asked you to drop it when you brought it up the other night,” there is a pounding in between Lily’s ears that she recognizes as the onset of fury, but she tries to be reasonable. She tries.

“I know you did, but I still think he’s been looking for a chance to get you alone—“

“Snape isn’t going to hex me,” Lily grits out. “If he wanted to he could have plenty of times before now. Yesterday afternoon, for example. And he didn’t.”

“Why were you having a conversation with him in the kitchens?” Snape says over James. He sounds like he’s being strangled.

“That’s none of your business.” Lily feels like she’s trying to have two arguments at once.

 “I still think he was going to hex you!” James interjects. “Mulciber followed Mary when she was alone, really alone, and he was doing the same thing! It’s his rite of passage or something!”

“Stop talking about things you don’t know anything about, Potter,” Snape sneers. “You don’t know the first thing about why Mulciber hexed MacDonald.”

“I thought you said you didn’t either,” Lily says slowly. The smirk drops from Snape’s face. “You told me you didn’t know anything about it.”

“You told me ages ago you hated James Potter. I guess neither of us have been very honest.” Snape isn’t smirking, but there’s a light in his eyes. He’s angry. But Lily is angry too.

“Who I am and am not friends with is none of your business. It stopped being any of your business when you called me a Mudblood.” Lily meets Snape’s eyes.

“Are you saying you are?”

“I’m saying you don’t get to have an opinion on it.” He flinches. She doesn’t.

“Lily, you know that i—“

“No.” Lily says. Snape has been trying to have this conversation for a year and she’s been running from it. She isn’t going to stop today. “I’m not talking about this. Potter, take your stupid fucking snacks.” She shoves the basket of cookies at James who stumbles backwards, and whirls away towards the common room. James follows her and Lily purposefully takes the stairs two at a time, making him run. They’re almost back to Gryffindor Tower when he catches at her elbow.

“Wait, Evans, wait,” he pants. “Shit. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry. But you have to understand that I’m worried, and Snape’s a slimeball—“

“You know I can take care of myself, right?” Lily keeps walking, and James hurries to follow her. “You do know that, right? I’m better at you in every class. I’m perfectly capable.”

“Of course I do, Merlin, of course I do! But so can Mary, and that she still got attacked.”

“Snape wouldn’t do anything to hurt me,” Lily says viciously.

“I don’t believe that for a minute.”

“I don’t care what you do and don’t believe. I know him. He wouldn’t.” Lily feels absurdly like crying but she swallows and clenches her jaw.

“You aren’t friends with him anymore for a reason!” James shouts.

“The reason I’m not friends with Snape is between us,” Lily says. “But I still know him better than you do. And he wouldn’t.”

They’re outside the portrait hole, and James stops and breathes out heavily through his nose. “You just don’t want him to be capable of it, right? You’re a lot more naïve than I thought.”

“Naïve?” Lily turns around so fast James drops the basket of cookies. “I’m naïve? You just want him to be bad, you want to paint him as the villain so you can swoop in and be the hero—“ something dawns on her suddenly and Lily laughs, feeling suddenly sick to her stomach. “That’s what this all is, isn’t it Potter?” She should have seen it sooner. “It’s all a big farce—a big show! You just want to make yourself look good and make Snape look bad and woo me— that’s what this is, right?“

“What?” James yelps. “Evans, that’s not—“

“It is, though!” Lily really feels like she’s going to cry. Tears of rage. “You’re using this situation with Mary to make yourself look good because you hate Snape and because everyone’s stopped looking at you after the Quidditch match and I won’t go out with you!”

“No!” James shouts back. All the veins in his neck are standing out. Lily remembers her fingers on his cold bare shoulder and how worried he was about Mary, and wants to hit him. “This is real stuff, not stupid kid’s stuff. Not anymore. I know I’ve been pretty awful to Snape and Snape’s been awful to me—stuff that I can’t tell you, stuff that nobody knows—but this is not about him! And it’s not about me.”

“I don’t believe you,” Lily chokes out. She feels like there’s a dam inside her that’s cracked, or a drain that’s been unplugged, and five years of horrible thoughts are spilling out. It’s been a long five years, and James hasn’t exactly been nice.

“I was trying to do something good!” James yells.

“You wanted to win!” Lily roars. Someone opens the portrait hole from the inside to see what the noise is about but Lily keeps going, ignoring their surprised voice. “You can’t win me on your own so you bully other people to make yourself look better, and now it’s alright because Snape and I aren’t friends, right? That makes it okay to be a jerk, right? And nobody will ever say anything because everyone in this school seems to think that the universe revolves around James Potter!”

“You just can’t stand the fact that you might be wrong about Snape, can you?” James yanks at his hair and his face is beet red and ugly. “That you might be wrong about something for once? That Lily Evans isn’t completely infallible?”

“At least I’m not a jerk!” Lily shouts. “Because you are, you’re a jerk .You’ve got everyone else fooled but I know. You’re a jerk. You’re a bully. The only thing you care about seems to be making Sirius Black laugh and winning at everything, and you can’t win at this.”

“This was not about me!”

“When have you ever done anything that isn’t about you?” Lily is breathing hard and she knows when she says it that’s mean. Really mean. She doesn’t care. “Are you capable of caring for anything other than  what people think about you?”

“I care about stuff,” James’s voice is suddenly very quiet, and he looks at his hands. Lily is also very aware that the portrait hole is still open, and the entire Gryffindor house is staring at them. “I care about Sirius, and Remus and Peter, and my parents, and I know it’s stupid to care about Quidditch but I do anyway, and I care about my friends. And I don’t really care what people think of me. Just you. I care about you.”

“Potter,” Lily says, and she feels tired. She feels like a thousand years of responsibility have been dropped on her shoulders. Her voice is thick. “You barely even know me.”

“Yeah,” James says. His voice is so quiet Lily can barely hear him. “I know I don’t. And you were never obligated to give me a chance to, but it might have been nice.”

He turns around, steps through the portrait hole and vanishes up the stairs to the boy’s dorm. For the first time in their history, James Potter turns and walks away from her, and Lily doesn't know what to say. 


	14. Wednesday

The weekend passes in a blur characterized by one of the strangest things Lily has ever experienced; silence in the Gryffindor common room. News travels faster than the common cold does in Hogwarts. Everyone, even those who hadn’t been anywhere near the common room at the time, seems to know that Lily Evans and James Potter have had a very serious argument. Thankfully, unlike the news of Mary’s attack, the rest of the school isn’t filled with gossip about it. They seem to have enough news to occupy them for the rest of the summer, and what with the Aurors’ visit and Mulciber’s expulsion another squabble between Evans and Potter probably doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. The rest of the Gryffindors aren’t talking about it either. That would be normal—irritating, granted, but normal. They’re doing almost the opposite.

Lily had stormed through the common room and upstairs after it was over and hadn’t come out, very aware of the twenty pairs of curious and confused eyes that had watched her go. The party had gone on without her, but she had hardly noticed. And when she had come downstairs around eleven the next morning, she had found a roomful of sleepy-eyed, tousled people straightening chairs and picking up glasses reliving the highlights of their festivities. Lily caught something about a transfigured potted plant who had turned into a flamingo, but as she stepped into the middle of the room to head towards the portrait hole everyone stopped their happy chatter to look her direction almost instantaneously. All of them had quickly turned away, busying themselves with cleaning up and avoiding Lily’s eye, and only Frank Longbottom had grunted a good morning before hurrying out the door. The same thing had happened at breakfast, and Lily eventually had given up to join Amelia in the Ravenclaw common room. She’d given that up when Amelia insisted they talk through their History of Magic exam again to compare answers, and retreated to the library to help Mary study.

Gryffindors are never quiet. A Gryffindor can be quiet on their own, but Gryffindors in a group of any size always make some noise. It’s unnatural, and it makes Lily nervous.

It isn’t like people in their house haven’t ever gotten into shouting matches before, Lily tells herself firmly as she shuffles through the common room on Monday morning with Dorcas in tow and listens to an uncomfortable silence descend around her. James and Sirius do it almost weekly. Bilius Weasley had punched Kingsley in the face two years back after a spectacularly bad loss to Ravenclaw and McGonagall had needed to pry them apart. Lily had done her own lion’s share of shouting,  and most of it at James Potter. Calling James a jerk in front of their house isn’t exactly a new turn of events in their relationship, and it’s usually met with applause or at least amusement. Usually when something like this happens the house entertains themselves for weeks recounting the details, but this week they seem to be tiptoeing around not only Lily but James too.

This is different somehow. Lily doesn’t really know why, but it is. There’s an air of seriousness that is completely different from how things usually are the week before the summer.  

Lily makes a point of sitting at the opposite end of the table from James and his friends during meals, and doesn’t come face to face with him until Monday afternoon. Mary is completing her Herbology exam and Dorcas is keeping Amelia company, and Lily is tired trying to ignore the looks people are  giving her in the common room and heads to the library to read through a letter from her father. She heads towards a table in the back, turns around a bookcase and practically trips over James. He, Sirius, Remus and Peter are hunched over a pile of parchment – well, Sirius, James and Peter are hunched, Remus is asleep with his head on the table. James’s feet are sticking out from beneath the legs of the chair and Lily’s shoe slides on his laces. She bangs her knee rather badly on the chair leg and curses. James turns around so fast he almost falls out of his seat.

“Shit,” he says, and slides sideways out of the chair to avoid looking Lily in the eye. He practically falls into Peter’s lap and almost runs towards the library doors. His faces flashes past her as he goes and it’s filled with something Lily has never really seen there before.  She can’t place it.

Peter, very pink in the face, follows him. Sirius sighs heavily and shoves the parchments they were looking at under Remus’s elbows. He glances apologetically at Lily and hurries away. Remus yawns and grapples with the parchment which appears to be covered in handwritten doodles and lines, then winces and rubs at his stomach.

“You’d think I’ve got the plague the way people have been acting,” Lily sighs.

“It’s alright if you do, I doubt I’d catch it,” Remus blinks sleepily at her.

“You really know how to make a girl feel special,” Lily says.

“I’m a man of many talents, what can I say?” Remus straightens the parchment into a neater pile which he slides the rest of the way under his folded-up sweater that he had repurposed as a pillow. Lily gets the distinct impression he’s trying to prevent her from looking at them and she’s too tired to even pretend she cares. Putting her head down on a library table and sleeping ‘til Friday doesn’t seem like a terrible option.

"Are you feeling alright?” Lily asks as Remus rubs at his ribs again. Madame Pomphrey had said he was beat up pretty badly. Lily had seen it happen, though it’s hard to think of the huge bristling wolf with flashing silver teeth fighting in the night while looking at Remus, who has sleepy eyes and skinny wrists and desperately needs a haircut. The eyes. The eyes are the same color.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Remus shrugs. “Like I said, I’ve looked worse. There are actually a few benefits to my, er, furry little problem. I heal fast.”

“That good, then.” Lily says. Remus looks terrible. The shadows under his eyes are crescent moon shaped and they’re even darker on his unusually pale face. She doesn’t know how he manages to keep his voice so light.

“Worst part is it’s a pain in the ass to stay drunk,” Remus says and yawns again hugely. “Fast metabolism. Getting stoned is so much fucking easier. And I’m tired all the bloody time for a week after." He rests his head on the pile of parchments again and blinks at her. "Look," Remus says suddenly, "thanks. Um. For--" 

"Don't worry about it," Lily says swiftly. 

"I do, though," Remus says. "I have to."

Lily leans her own head down on the table to look him in the eye. His face is very serious, no jokes. "I won't tell anybody," she says. 

"I know," Remus says. "Maybe it's easier-- my mother, she's a Muggle you know, she doesn't--" he pauses. "I don't know if she understands. I don't know if they do either, honestly." 

"I've got no idea what your-- er-- condition is like," Lily says quietly, "but I get what it's like to feel different, at least." 

"That's what I mean," Remus says, and yawns again.

"Well then you're welcome," Lily says, and the corner of his mouth turns up in a smile. She sits there in silence for a while until Remus falls back asleep, almost like he had never woken up at all.

Lily watches his skinny shoulders rise and fall a few times and absentmindedly ruffles his hair before heading to her own table to read her mail. Her dad usually drives up to London to meet her train and meets her outside the platform, but he has to work the night before and won’t be able to get there until later in the afternoon. Petunia is not available to pick Lily up herself (he doesn’t elaborate but Lily suspects her sister isn’t actually busy and simply said no. She hasn’t come along to drop Lily off at King’s Cross in years). Lily has taken the train back home by herself once or twice but found that people tend to stare a little too long at her Hogwarts trunk, so she starts replying to her dad that she doesn’t mind if he’s late, they can have a late lunch in the city before heading for home. His letter devolves into chronicling Petunia’s attempts to singlehandedly organize her own wedding while also making Vernon Dursley’s parents happy, and Lily sighs and puts it away. July 15th. This is a day they’d talked about, as pigtailed little girls hiding under the covers at night when they were supposed to be asleep. As she got older it was something Lily fantasized about less and less because her own fantasies literally came to life around her, but she knows how much it means to her sister. And she’s barely involved. She’s not even entirely sure what the bridesmaid dresses look like, other than knowing they’re pink and will probably clash with her hair. It’ll be scorching hot, and she’ll have to stand next to Vernon’s horrible sister Marge, and she doesn’t even have a date. Not that Lily wants one. Not that Lily even has someone she’d like to bring. She hasn’t dated anybody in six months, hasn’t even wanted to.

She responds to her dad, heads up to the Owlery to post the letter, and goes to find Mary for dinner. Remus is still asleep on the library table when she leaves.

“He looks like he ate something that he’s horrified to find has come back to life,” Mary observes on Tuesday. They’re out on the lawn in the midafternoon sun trying to ignore the fact that they all have an incredible amount of packing to do. It’s officially stopped being warm and is verging on sweltering, and she, Dorcas and Mary had all looked at their empty trunks, then at each other, then wordlessly given up and gone outside. Lily does not want her attention to be directed towards James Potter, who is further down the hill with his friends. But Mary is insistent on it.

“No he doesn’t,” Alice says contemplatively. “He looks like he just found out that he has ten days to live and the only way to extend his lifespan is to kiss the Slytherin Quidditch captain.”

“Or that his mum has decided to teach erotic dance at Hogwarts next year,” Dorcas says, fanning herself with her hand.

“Stop staring at him,” Lily buries her head in the cool grass. Sweat is gathering along her hairline and while they all have divulged themselves of robes and shoes, she’s still uncomfortably hot. “It’s probably a ploy for attention. Maybe he hopes I’ll feel bad. I don’t.”

“I’d be surprised if you did,” Mary nods. “There are some things I like about Potter, his Quidditch ability really, but there’s a boy who was not told off enough by his mother.”

“I’m nobody’s mother!” Lily lifts her head up to glare at Mary.

“Didn’t say you were.”

“He does look miserable,” Alice says.

“James Potter is officially on the list of things I don’t want to talk about ever again,” Lily says to the grass. “Exams, my sister’s honeymoon activities, and James Potter.”

“Fine, fine,” Mary tugs up a handful of grass and shoves it down Dorcas’s shirt and there’s a great deal of shrieking and kicking and the subject is thankfully changed.

Privately, Lily thinks James looks like he’s drowning. He passes them ten minutes later, tie undone and sleeves rolled up because of the heat, looking as limp and uncomfortable as Lily feels. Even his hair is flat. He almost purposefully doesn’t look their way as he passes, even though Dorcas has Mary in a headlock and is shoving handfuls of grass into her pockets. Sirius, Remus and Peter are a few feet ahead of him talking very quickly together but James doesn’t seem to be engaged in whatever they’re planning. They pass by head inside and for a moment Lily feels satisfied, like she’s won. She hadn’t felt that way after the argument on Friday night, which had been part of the problem. Lily is loathe to admit it even after having it pointed out to her several times by Mary and Dorcas, but she likes to win.

A second later though, everything feels wrong. It takes her up ‘til dinner to figure out that it’s the silence. Again, the silence. It’s been five years since James Potter has walked past her without saying something, no matter how banal. Most of the time it’s nonsense, self-satisfied and only occasionally funny, and Lily can’t pretend she wasn’t mostly annoyed by it all. But it didn’t happen, and Lily feels wrong.

“He’s such a jerk,” Lily says out loud. “Does he really think he can, what, make me feel bad by looking dejected?”

“He seems willing to give it a shot,” Mary says. “Desperate boys will go to great lengths.”

“Just ignore him, Lily,” Dorcas says. “Don’t let him get to you. He’s trying to tug at your heartstrings.”

“I’m going to vomit,” Lily sighs.

There’s a place inside Lily’s chest underneath her ribs but over her stomach that feels hollow and empty and it aches when she thinks about her sister, or Snape. She tries her best to ignore it most days. But James gets up from the dinner table and leaves the Great Hall with an expression on his face that can only be described as sad, and it feels very big and very empty.

“You do not feel guilty, Lily Evans,” Lily tells her pillow very firmly that night. “You are not getting soft, and you were not out of line and you do not feel guilty.” Something in her stomach squirms as if to correct her that yes, indeed, she does. “No!” Lily informs it. “Absolutely not.”

It doesn’t really help, and she still feels miserable.

On Wednesday morning, McGonagall snags her elbow on her way to breakfast and hands her a slip of paper with Dumbledore’s neat handwriting requesting a meeting that afternoon at three. McGonagall smiles in a conspiratorial way and heads off to the staff table, and Lily sits and wordlessly hands Mary the note. Mary shrieks and whacks Lily hard on the shoulder.

“It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a note—“ Lily tries to say, but Mary hands it to Dorcas who shrieks twice as loud and hits Lily on the other shoulder. People glance down the table at them, and Mary shoots them a dirty look and whirls around to whack Lily some more.

“It definitely means something!” Dorcas says shrilly.

“What if it doesn’t!” Lily shrieks back.

“It does!” Mary shouts back.

“Oh my God,” Lily shouts, and buries her head in her hands.

The morning seems to crawl by, and Lily spends most of the afternoon pacing back and forth in their room. At twenty to three Dorcas’s patience finally frays and she kicks her out. Lily walks down to Dumbledore’s office, a place she has personally never visited, as slowly as she can to compensate for the fact  that her heart is beating out an irregular bass line on her ribs. It feels silly to be so nervous, but she is.

The headmaster’s office is behind a large stone statue of a gargoyle in an otherwise unoccupied hallway. Dumbledore’s note, written in a spidery hand, has the time of their meeting and one additional word that Lily assumes is the password. It seems like Dumbledore’s idea of a password. Or Dumbledore’s idea of a joke.

“Um,” Lily clears her throat in the gargoyle’s direction, and looks down the hallway to make sure nobody overhears her in case it is a joke. “Peppermint toad?” The gargoyle suddenly springs to life and steps back, revealing a narrow spiral staircase. Lily stuffs the note into her pocket climbs them.

Dumbledore’s office is a large circular room, lined with bookshelves and cabinets and many portraits of sleeping previous headmasters and headmistresses. It feels like exactly what the wizard’s laboratories Lily always imagined as a little girl should look like; books piled up and strange, mysterious devices whistling and whirring in corners. Dumbledore himself is sitting at a large claw-footed desk, though he stands and smiles when Lily pokes her head around the door.

“Miss Evans,” he comes around his desk to pull out a chair for her, one of two situated across from his own seat. “Please sit down. This will be a very quick meeting, don’t worry, as I know the weather is beautiful outside and my office is persistently stuffy. I’m sure I’m tearing you away from many an end-of-the-year party.” Dumbledore’s eyes twinkle in a way that makes Lily think he’s referring not only to the number of rule-breaking parties that go on the last week of every year, but one party in particular.

“You heard about that, Headmaster?” Lily feels herself flushing.

“I manage to hear about most things,” Dumbledore nods wisely, and moves to sit on the other side of his desk again. “Fortunately for both of us I think, quarrels within the student body are not what I wish to discuss with you. Though maybe it’s something we will be discussing next year, hm?”

“Is it, sir?” Lily grabs at her knees with her hands to stop herself from wiggling nervously.

“It is, Miss Evans. It is indeed.” Dumbledore beams at her from behind his glasses, and Lily feels an overwhelmingly warm feeling blossoming in her chest.

“Really?” She has to physically stop herself from shrieking in excitement. Shrieking in excitement isn’t something the future Head Girl of Hogwarts does, definitely not in front of the headmaster.

“The four Heads of House and I have come to a consensus and are delighted to have unanimously chosen you to be Hogwarts’s Head Girl, Miss Evans. We’re all very proud, Professor McGonagall and myself most of all.”

“Thank you,” Lily says around the swell of emotions in her throat. For what feels like the fiftieth time this week, she feels like crying. In a good way, this time. Her dad will be proud of her, she thinks. Her mom would have been too. This makes it all worth it, somehow, justifies it. Dumbledore smiling kindly and somewhat mischievously across the desk from her doesn’t make up for James, for Snape, for Mulciber attacking her friend and for more than that, less concrete things. For every time they looked down their noses at her or whispered to themselves or told each other she couldn’t do it because she didn’t belong there. She does. “Really, Headmaster. I can’t even begin to express what this means.”

“You are very welcome,” Dumbledore says. “I do not have anything more formal to share with you at this point—you’ll be mailed a considerable number of documents in a month I’m afraid, a little summer reading. I simply wish to impart the good news, as I feel like we all need it after this year.”

“You can say that again Headmaster,” Lily laughs a little.

“And I will. Congratulations, Miss Evans.”

Lily grins at Dumbledore across his desk, feeling something close to giddiness. “Thank you,” she says again, and lets herself enjoy the fact that she has been congratulated by the headmaster. “Do you mind me asking—“ she says after a minute, “and ignore me if it’s rude, please, but could you tell me who the Head Boy is?”

“I do not mind, no,” Dumbledore says, “as you will be working closely together in the upcoming year. I asked him to meet me here in, oh, five minutes or so—you may bump into him in the hallway.”

“It’s Remus, right? Remus Lupin?”

Dumbledore frowns. “No, Mister Lupin is not Head Boy. Mister Lupin came to me personally a few weeks ago actually, and specifically requested he not be made Head Boy. He expressed his concern at how his poor health could impact his handling of the welfare of other students. I, of course, do not agree, but I do believe that Mister Lupin has some other things on his mind and the position is not one I wish to burden him with.”

“Oh,” Lily says, feeling a little disappointed. Remus, truth be told, hadn’t been the world’s best prefect but she does like him a very great deal. “Who—“ A knock at Dumbledore’s office door interrupts her.

“That is probably him now,” Dumbledore says, and then he stands. “Come in!” The door swings open and James Potter, looking very apprehensive, steps into the room. Lily feels her heart stop, actually stop beating, inside her chest.

“I don’t know what Professor McGonagall, or Hagrid, or anyone has told you, sir,” James starts talking very fast as soon as the door opens. “And I’ll go ahead and admit that the exploding dinner was me, it was definitely me, I’ll take the blame for that freely. But I haven’t done anything for a week at least that you should be worried—oh—sorry.” He stops short and his face, which had been red and blotchy, goes white. “Er,” he says. “I interrupted something, sorry.”

“This isn’t a disciplinary meeting Mister Potter,” Dumbledore says lightly. “Come in then, sit down. Quite the opposite I can assure you, though thank you for the note about last week’s dinner. I’ll be sure to inform Professor McGonagall if I remember.”

“Okay—“ James shuts the door and takes a few steps into the room. “I can come back later, Headmaster. It’s no trouble.”

“No, no, please sit down. I promise I will take away only a few minutes of your time.” James reluctantly sits in a chair to Lily’s left. He doesn’t look at her.

“Er,” Lily says. “Sorry, Headmaster, but I’ve missed something, or there’s a joke I’m not getting—“

“Not at all,” Dumbledore sits back down. “It is, in fact, deceptively clear. Miss Evans, Mister Potter, I’m happy to tell you both that you have been selected to be our next Head Girl and Boy.”

“What.” James says in a very small voice.

“What?” Lily asks, her ears ringing.

“WHAT.” James repeats. Dumbledore just smiles.


	15. Wednesday (Still)

Lily and James stare at Dumbledore. Dumbledore smiles blithely back at them across his desk. They must look ridiculous, Lily thinks, both of them with their mouths open and their eyes wide. She can’t understand how Dumbledore isn’t cracking up. He must have a lot of practice keeping a straight face. A full minute of silence passes, and then James exhales shakily and abruptly starts laughing.

“You really got me there, Headmaster,” he says. “Your poker face is incredible, you know that? Had me completely fooled!”

“Right,” Lily says quickly, “right, it’s very funny. I think I had a heart attack, that’s how funny it was.”

“While I do love a good joke as much as anyone—I heard a good one the other day, Mister Potter, that I suspect you and Mister Black will find very amusing, do remind me to tell you another time—I really think now is not the appropriate moment.”

“Ha ha,” James says. “Real practical joker, Headmaster.”

“I’m not joking, Mister Potter. You’re Head Boy. I can show you the letter I’ve drafted to your mother if it would alleviate any of your doubts.”

“Yeah, yeah sure,” James says decisively, and he leans across the table to take the piece of paper Dumbledore hands him. He reads it over quickly and then slumps back in his seat, slow horror crawling across his face.

“I’m Head Boy?”

“Yes, Mister Potter.”

“And she’s Head Girl.”

“Exactly so.”

“Merlin’s saggy balls,” James looks like someone has taken a frying pan and pummeled him across the back of the head with it. Lily wishes she had a frying pan to pummel him with.

“Quite,” Dumbledore takes the discarded letter and sets it back on the pile of papers on his desk, and Lily finds her voice.

“I’m sorry sir, but this can’t be right. You can’t do this to me.” Dumbledore raises an eyebrow. “He wasn’t even a Prefect!” Lily snaps. She unclenches her left hand from its fist to point at James; she has left half moon nail imprints on the inside of her palm. “I don’t mean any disrespect, but this is the stupidest thing I’ve heard all year. It can’t be right. Professor McGonagall can’t have—“

“Minerva and I are in agreement with our choices for these positions,” Dumbledore says calmly.

“Now I know you’re having us on,” James blurts out. “McGonagall would never ever in a thousand years vouch for me. I’ve blown up too many toilets.”

“There isn’t a rule that says the Head Boy or Girl need be a Prefect,” Dumbledore says. “Nor is there one that explicitly states the Head Boy’s toilet explosion record be clean.”

“I’ve had like a hundred detentions!” James almost wails.

“Exactly!” Lily practically shouts. “We’ll never get anything done—we’ll kill each other before the year is out! He’s impossible.”

“Absolutely,” James tugs at his hair. “Listen to her. She’d know.”

“You’d have to be mad to look at him and think, yes, here’s someone to whom I should give responsibility—“

“Miss Evans, please sit down,” Dumbledore’s voice is still calm but he is beginning to sound annoyed. Lily sits quickly. “If you are questioning my mental faculties, I can assure you I am as sharp as I have ever been and I recommend that you stop doing so at once.”

“Sorry, sir,” Lily says quietly. She looks down at her shoes, willing herself to calm down.  

“As for your concerns—“ Dumbledore pauses for a moment, studying James, who seems to have forgotten how to blink. “I do not usually find myself justifying my decisions but I will do you both the courtesy as you both seem very determined to convince me otherwise. I don’t know if anyone has experienced having both Lily Evans and James Potter shout them down before. It’s quite impressive.” James swallows audibly, and Lily can feel the heat radiating from her face.

“Professor McGonagall and I discussed the issue at length, and as I’m sure you can imagine, and we decided Mister Potter’s leadership qualities, particularly his excellence as Quidditch captain—I don’t think I congratulated you properly for that Mister Potter so well done—set him apart. His academic record is more than acceptable despite the number of exploded toilets connected to his name and he works hard and well when the spirit seems to move him. He displays a commitment to helping others—not all the time, of course, but to ask that would be quite impossible. His growth over the past year has been remarkable. And of course, there are the events of one particular evening this fall, which helped to solidify my decision.”

“What?” Lily is aware her mouth is hanging open and she snaps it shut. She has never heard anyone say so many nice things about James in one go without laughing. “What happened?” James, who is bright red, shifts uncomfortably. They must both be bright red. A properly tomato-colored Head Boy and Girl.

“The details are, you must understand Miss Evans, completely confidential,” Dumbledore says. “All I can say is that Mister Potter displayed the bravery and daring your house is known for but also an acute sense of judgment and a commitment to doing what is right—“

Lily can’t help herself; she snorts. Dumbledore’s rhetoric is too high-minded and he seems to know it, because he smiles.

“—a commitment to doing what is right even when it is not easy, when he put his own life in danger to save the life of Mister Severus Snape.”

Lily’s brain slams on its breaks so hard she feels she’s given herself whiplash.

“What?” she whispers.

“Which proved to me that Mister Potter, though he hides it well in pranks and an affinity for dungbombs, has a commitment to helping others even when it does not benefit himself,” Dumbledore finishes. James is so red his ears are probably smoking.

“You didn’t—this can’t—what?” Lily stammers. James meets her eye for the first time since Friday, and shrugs.

“I’m very sorry, Miss Evans, Mister Potter, but I have a few other matters to attend to before the afternoon is up,” Dumbledore glances at the clock on his desk and stands, obviously intending to shoo them both out of the room. A good thing, as Lily feels like the strength has been leeched from her limbs. “Congratulations to you both. I will send your letters home in a week or two so do expect them.”

Feeling dazed, Lily stands and heads towards the spiral staircase. She feels like she’s moving underwater. She and James exit the stairs and he slumps suddenly against the wall. His face is pale again.

“Oh my God,”  Lily says.

“Fuck,” James replies.

“You’re Head Boy.”

“My mother is never going to shut up,” James says weakly.

“I’m having a nightmare.”

“You and me both.”

“Fuck.”

“What am I going to tell her?” James looks very much like Lily feels, like he’s going to be very ill all over the floor. “What am I—oh Merlin, oh fuck. What the fuck am I going to tell Sirius? My life is over. My life. Is over. Fuck.” And he stands and walks slowly in the direction of the Great Hall. Lily watches him go, and then her legs give out from under her and she slides down the wall to sit heavily on the floor.

“What the fuck,” she says to the empty hallway.

It takes Lily almost a half an hour to pull herself together enough to get up and walk back to the Gryffindor common room. It is, thankfully, almost empty, and she finds Mary and Dorcas in their room. Both of them are looking hopelessly at their half-packed trunks, but they jump up with Lily walks in.

“And?” Dorcas looks like she wants to look excited, but is reeling it in because of the expression on Lily’s face. Lily is sure it’s horrific.

“I’m Head Girl,” she says.

“Oh, Lily that’s wonderful!” Dorcas shouts. 

“You’ll be so brilliant at it,” Mary adds.

“I’m so happy for you!” Dorcas continues, then pauses. “Er, we are happy, right? Only you look like someone’s died. Someone hasn’t, have they? Nobody’s dead?”

“No,” Lily says.

“Lily—“ Mary pauses. “Just come out with it? What’s wrong?”

“James Potter is Head Boy,” Lily says weakly, sitting heavily down on the edge of Mary’s bed.

There is a long pause. Both Dorcas and Mary are staring at her.

“No way,” Dorcas says finally.

“Yeah.”

“Really? Potter?” Mary frowns. “Is that really the best idea?”

“Dumbledore definitely seems to think so,” Lily manages.

“Did you ask him why?”

“Yep, and I, er, might have implied he’s a bit mad.”

“Oops,” Dorcas winces.

“He wasn’t happy about that. It’s a done deal. James Potter is Head Boy.” They both sit down next to her, looking appropriately horrified. Lily drops her head onto Dorcas’s shoulder.

“That’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard,” Dorcas pats her hair. “I can’t believe it.” Mary, however, frowns.

“I don’t know, it’s not awful.” Dorcas and Lily both give her a sharp look. “Well, look,” she shrugs. “Who else was it going to be? Remus? Remus couldn’t care less about being a Prefect. You’ve complained about it all year, Lily.”

“I guess,” Lily says doubtfully.

“And Potter is a really good Quidditch captain,” Mary continues. “You two don’t see that side of him but I promise he is. He comes off a bit intense about it, I know, but he does something to the team that I’ve never seen anyone else do.” She chews her lip for a minute, obviously trying to pick the right words. “He’s great at seeing what every individual person is good at. He encourages what you do well and points out what you need to do better without ever making you feel bad about it. He makes you—this is really silly but it’s true—he makes you want to work harder to do him proud. You want Potter to be proud of you at the end of practice. He inspires people.”

“You’re right, that does sound silly.”

“It’s true thought.”

“I guess you’re right Mary,” Dorcas says after a minute. “He does get people , doesn’t he?”

“Are we talking about the same boy?” Lily says exasperatedly. “Because that does not sound like the James Potter I know.”

“I don’t think you know him all that well,” Mary shrugs.

“And, let’s face it, you’ve always been a bit funny about James,” Dorcas adds.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, necessarily. It’s true though.”

“You’re supposed to be pitying me right now!” Lily shouts, and they quickly console her. An hour later Dorcas has opened up her emergency stash of ice mice and they’re sprawled on Mary’s bed listening to the radio with the windows open, and Lily’s heart feels a little lighter. She missed out what feels now like years of friendship with her roommates because she was scared, and because she had Snape and they never hid the fact that they disliked him. Lily shoves the thought aside as she shoves candy into her mouth. She has been trying to avoid thinking about the fact that Snape lied to her, or at least said that he did; it’s possible he was bragging about what he knew in front of James. Probably, actually. She knows Snape had tried to rub their friendship in James’s face in the past, and now that he doesn’t have that he needs another button to push to make him angry.

There is also the possibility that Snape wasn’t lying, and actually did know something about Mulciber and Mary and this whole thing is large and sinister and connected to Death Eaters and mysterious attackers in black masks and so unbelievably over their heads. The thought makes Lily feel dizzyingly small, but also angry.

She has to know, she thinks. Mary, in a Hollyhead Harpies tshirt and shorts that show off her Quidditch-battered tan legs, laughs and kicks a pillow at Dorcas who dodges it. Mary still looks tired, and Lily knows she hasn’t slept well the last few nights. But she’s also beautiful; her hair in the afternoon sunlight is shimmering gold and she has a loud, bubbly laugh. Dorcas is beautiful too, her dark eyes sparkling as she seizes the pillow and smacks Mary across the shoulders with it. Lily is suddenly filled with love for them, a great wave of it, made stronger by the fact that the danger for them could be real. For her, too.

She has to know. Before the week is over, she decides, she’ll talk to Snape and she’ll find out the truth.

“I really need to pack,” Dorcas says mournfully after finally kicking the pillow across the room. “Look at this. I need to.” Their room is absolutely a mess, and Lily sadly admits that she’s right and it’s time. It makes the end of the year feel very final, but it also has to be done.

Ten minutes later Lily realizes she’s left several of her textbooks down in the common room several days before, and she makes herself get up to go retrieve them after being instructed to look around for anything that may belong to Mary or Dorcas. The common room completely empty, or so Lily thinks. She’s grappling under a couch for one of her lost books when hears a voice behind her.

“Need any help?”

Lily turns around to see Peter Pettigrew, sitting by himself in a corner by a window with a comic book and a sandwich on a plate in his lap.

“Oh, hi Peter,” Lily succeeds in getting her fingers around the book, pulls it out from under the couch and straightens up. “No, I’m fine thanks.” It’s strange to see Peter by himself, almost like seeing someone suddenly missing a limb. Lily looks around instinctively for the other three.

“They’re helping James write a letter to his mum,” Peter says like he’s read her mind. “He’s a bit distraught. Sirius laughed for a half an hour. I frankly needed a bit of a rest.”

“I’m sure,” Lily says. “They’ve got to be exhausting.”

“Oh yeah,” Peter says cheerfully. “One gets used to it, but every now and then it’s nice to sit by yourself and not worry that someone else will steal your sandwich before you have a chance to finish it.”

Lily laughs in spite of herself. “Well, enjoy it,” she says. “Seen anything else that looks like it might belong to Dorcas?”

Peter shrugs and Lily lifts up a few more pillows without success. “Congratulations, by the way,” Peter says after he chews for a minute. “On being Head Girl. You’re perfectly suited for it.”

“Thanks, Peter,” Lily says. She’s about to turn and head back upstairs but something makes her pause and turn around. “Is it true?“ she says. Peter frowns at her over his sandwich. “Did he really save Snape’s life?” Something like panic dashes across Peter’s face and he almost drops his sandwich but manages to rescue it and set it down. He opens his mouth and frowns, obviously unwilling to say anything he shouldn’t. “It’s fine,” Lily says. “Dumbledore mentioned it this afternoon. He said the details were confidential but—so it did actually—“

“Yeah,” Peter looks very relieved. “Yeah it did.”

“Okay, wow,” Lily lets out a long breath. She knew Dumbledore wasn’t lying but for some reason it really hits her when it comes from Peter. Just one of those faces, she supposes. Honest. “It’s just a bit hard to take in.”

“You can say that again,” Peter nods emphatically. “It was a bit of a shock.”

“He actually really did? He wasn’t just exaggerating?”

“No, he pretty literally snatched Snape from the jaws of death. A pretty dark moment for everyone.” Peter frowns. “Worked out in the end though. Somehow.”

“Right, well,” Lily nods at him. “Enjoy your sandwich.” She turns back towards the stairs and then stops, again, and blurts out ,”He’s going to be okay, right? Potter? Not that I care, because I don’t. At all. But I didn’t fuck him up too badly?”

“Um,” Peter is frowning again, but this time it’s pretty obvious that he’s frowning at her. “Lily—“ he stops. “Um.” He stops again.

“That moping thing he’s doing’s just an act, right? It’s bloody annoying. I don’t feel bad for him if that’s what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not making me any more likely to date him.” Lily is babbling and she knows it, but for some reason she finds she desperately needs to hear Peter say that it’ll all be fine.

“He’s pretty fucked up, actually,” Peter says slowly. He’s staring at her like he’s never looked at her properly before. “Really fucked up. I’ve never seen him act like this.”

“He throws histrionics all the time,” Lily says. “I’ve seen him do it.”

“Yeah, I guess, though Padfoot is much worse. This is different.” Peter chews at his bottom lip for a minute. “Usually when, well to be perfectly honest when you turn him down or when a prank goes wrong, James’ll be upset but he’ll be cooking up a new plan to fix it. Now he’s not even angry—he’s just sad.”

“Why?” Lily is taken aback. “Because I embarrassed him? He’ll get over it. Maybe he finally realized he can’t cook up a plan to win me over.”

“I think you hurt his feelings,” Peter squirms uncomfortably.

“Yeah sure, his ego’s bruised,” Lily rolls her eyes. “He’ll mope his way off to summer vacation and move on and maybe when we come back in the fall he’ll have enough sense to swoon over a girl who’ll say yes to him. Though I suppose that takes the fun out of it doesn’t it?”

“That’s not really what this is, I don’t think,” Peter says tentatively. “Him swooning over you. Merlin knows it is annoying—“ Lily snorts, “—and we’d all like him to shut up about it but it’s not some ego thing.”

“Oh whatever,” Lily says. “He wants me because I’m the only girl in the school who turns him down. If I said yes tomorrow I wouldn’t be interesting anymore. I know I sound awful, Peter, but I know that’s what it is. It’s a big game and I’m tired of it.”

Peter squints at her so hard Lily becomes worried she’s grown antlers or something. She’s about to reach up and tentatively pat at her hair when he sits back in his chair and laughs. It’s a completely unexpected reaction. “You really don’t? You really think—Oh, fuck. Oh, Prongs,” he sighs, wiping at his eyes. “I knew he made a colossal fool of himself in front of you but I never thought it was quite this bad.”

“I’m sorry?” Lily can’t grasp what’s so funny.

“This really isn’t a conversation I want to have but—oh bugger it all—I know James has made a huge dick of himself. He absolutely has. I guess it wasn’t clear to me exactly how much and he better be really blood grateful for this. Look, this is absolutely not my job and I’m not trying to change your mind because James is a dick and you’re not wrong to think that but—“ Peter someone manages to chuckle and wince at the same time. “Lily, James is mad about you. Really properly besotted. Has been for years. He’s just really terrible at showing it.”

Lily sits down slowly on the couch across from Peter. “This isn’t just another ploy of his, is it?” She asks. “Because that’s what it seems like.”

Peter looks annoyed. “No, it’s not a fucking ploy of his. I do have more things to do than worry about James Potter’s personal life you know. Nobody ever asks about mine, which is fine, by the way. I’m not a bloody errand boy. Merlin, you’re suited for each other. He never shuts up about you either.”

“Sorry,” Lily says quickly. “I just had to check. Wait—are you saying I never shut up about Potter?”

“Sometimes,” Peter shrugs. “Anyway, there you have it. James is head over heels for you. Cross my bloody fucking heart.”

“I mean, I know that,“ Lily leans forward and props her elbows up on her knees. Her brain feels like it’s trying to cram too much information into it at one time. “I know he’s got a crush on me, that’s not news. But he’s always been so over the bloody annoying about it, so theatrical, trying to get me to trip so he can catch me, his horrible lines, trying to get me to go out with him in the middle of bullying Snape. You were there for that, you remember. It was horrid.”

“It was,” Peter nods fervently.  “It was horrid.”

“So you can’t tell me that was someone who’s feeling are completely genuine,” Lily continues. “It’s always been this big public display, a competition with himself to get me to cave.”

“You’re not wrong,” Peter says slowly. “I think maybe it started that way and he definitely took it way too far. But you’re also forgetting something.”

“What?”

“James is really, really, really bad at flirting,” Peter says. 

“Nobody can be that bad.”

“ I’m serious. He told me-- and this is almost word for word, I'm not making it up. He really talks like this. A few weeks ago he said that when you walk in a room or when he sees you it’s like all the air goes out of it and he can’t think. He also mentioned--” Peter makes a face. “Merlin this is unspeakable, I can’t believe I’m saying this. He said that he’s always admired you because you never back down from your convictions and you expect everyone else to have the same commitment and bravery. Ugh.” Peter wipes his hands on his pants like he’s wiping away the remnants of a particularly sweaty handshake.

“Oh my God,” Lily says.

“He goes all gooey when he talks about you, Lily. It’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen, and I share a room with Sirius Black. But it’s genuine, even if it’s gross. No offense meant, because we all want to go off on him and you deserve to more than anyone except his mother, but you did really hurt his feelings. ”

“Perfect,” Lily says heavily, the heaviness in her stomach suddenly very obvious.

“Sorry,” Peter says quickly. “That I have to be the one to tell you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want it to matter—“

“It does, though,” Lily says slowly. “I feel really bad about it. I have since last week. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” She’s surprised she says this at all. She hasn’t told Dorcas and Mary, and here she is confessing to Peter Pettigrew. The words feel like they fly out of her mouth and once they’re gone she feels embarrassed, but somehow better. “It’s been a weird day.”

“Weird year,” Peter picks up his sandwich again.

“Yeah,” Lily agrees. “Sorry I interrupted your sandwich eating.” She stands up and retrieves her book.

“Not to worry,” Peter says cheerfully. “I deal with people far more dramatic than you. I hope you figure out what’s happening to you.”

“What’s happened is I’ve heard too many good things about James Potter in the past twelve hours than the rest of our school year combined,” Lily tries to laugh. It’s much more than that and they both know it, but Peter smiles anyway.

Lily is very nearly at the stairs when she stops and turns around one more time. “Peter,” she calls. Peter, mouth  full, looks very alarmed. “Who’s Sirius dating?”

Peter gestures towards his enormous mouthful of sandwich, and shrugs, and Lily gives up and goes back upstairs.


	16. Thursday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> portions of the end conversation borrowed from 'the deathly hollows,' which i've shamelessly added to for my own purposes. i know it probably happens earlier in canon and i don't care too much-- the only justification i have is that it was a piece of snape's memory in 'the deathly hollows' and memories are pretty subjective and fluid and might not have told the complete story.

Lily sleeps late the next morning, and she and Dorcas spend most of the morning out on the lawn with Amelia and Alice while Mary is finishing up her last exam absorbing the heat and avoiding a sunburn. The sun has already started picking out even more freckles on Lily’s shoulder and knees, and the promise of impending summer coupled with staggering warmth has made them all a bit giddy. Lily wipes a line of sweat from along her hairline when they get up to have lunch, and thinks longingly about how cool Gryffindor tower gets with all the windows open.

She, Dorcas, Amelia and Mary all leave the Great Hall together and make a quick trip to the Owlery so Amelia can fetch her owl. The Owlery always smells awful but the heat makes it even worse, so they’re in and out very quickly and are descending the stairs when they bump almost headlong into Avery, Rosier and Snape. Lily’s stomach turns; she had been hoping Mary wouldn’t have to see any more of them before the summer, and she has had enough confrontations this year to last her a lifetime. Lily gets behind Mary and ushers her past them on the stairs and they’re almost past when Rosier turns around.

“Hope you’re happy, McDonald,” he says, and there is no playful sneer in his voice. It’s all hard and mean. “Hope you’re real happy, because you won’t be soon, I can promise you that.” Mary’s shoulders go very tense, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Don’t bother,” Dorcas snaps. “We’re not going to fight you. And if you try anything you’ll get expelled too, so don’t.”

Avery and Rosier both laugh. Snape looks nervous. “We’re not worried about being expelled, Meadows,” Avery says nastily. “Who cares about this Muggle loving school anyway?”

“We’ve got much bigger plans,” Rosier adds. “We won’t be playing around with you lot after this summer.”

“Except to hex you in the woods maybe,” Avery snorts, and Mary exhales sharply.

“Yeah,” she says through very gritted teeth. “Because the Death Eaters or You-Know-Who or whoever really wants a bunch of knuckleheaded teenagers who get off on pushing others around, right? Have you met him? I very much doubt it. You’re nobody, so fuck off before I knock you down the stairs.”

“You don’t know anything,” Rosier snarls. “We will meet him. We know people who have. We’re all getting the tattoo this summer, and then the fun’ll really begin, won’t it?”

Lily isn’t sure what he means exactly, what tattoo he’s referring to, but it doesn’t matter. His voice has a ring of truth to it that goes beyond simple egotism. She thinks about James sitting across from her in the kitchen telling her Regulus Black has been asked to sign up. He wasn’t making it up. He was right. Despite herself, she looks at Severus, who is standing a few steps behind Avery and Rosier and is obviously very uncomfortable.

“Are you hearing this?” Lily says, and she’s only talking to one of them. “Is this your big plan? Is it really what you want?” Her tongue feels like sandpaper in her splintery mouth.

Rosier says something that Lily doesn’t even register. Snape looks at the ground, then at her, then at his feet, then at her again, and there is something dark and bitter on his face that makes Lily take a step backwards.

“Shut up, Mudblood,” he says, quietly but clearly. Avery grins and slaps him on the back, but Snape doesn’t look away from her. His face is very white, almost bloodless, and his hair is in his eyes and he doesn't look anything like the boy she used to know. 

“Right,” Lily says. “I see. Come on, you guys, we’re done here.” Dorcas, Mary and Amelia hurry down the stairs but Lily pauses before she follows them.

“Just a warning,” she says, and she’s a bit surprised at her own voice. It doesn’t sound like hers. It’s mean and it stops them all midsentence. “If any of you ever come near my friends ever again, I’ll make you wish you’ve never been born.”

Her heart somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach, Lily turns to follow her friends downstairs. Mary turns to look at her when she joins them and opens her mouth.

"Don't," Lily stops her before she can say anything. "I don't want to think about it yet."

They spend the rest of their afternoon staring down the fact that they all really, really need to pack and have very little time left. Dorcas starts on a quest to track down all her pairs of socks, Mary adopts the practice of digging things out from under her bed and tossing them haphazardly into her trunk, and Lily is faced with the same problem she encounters every year, that the stuff she brought from home has quadrupled in size and will not fit. They take a short break for dinner but around nine Lily is serious beginning to think this year it will actually be impossible to smash everything into her trunk before she remembers that she can use magic to make it all work. She’s folding clean robes and sweaters when, around midnight, Mary sits up suddenly and curses.

“I forgot my fucking Quidditch stuff,” she shouts, and flees out of the room, leaving her disorderly trunk behind her.

“Maybe next year will be the year we finally start this earlier than the night before,” Dorcas says mournfully.

Their door opens twenty minutes later and Mary re-enters the room, holding her recovered Quidditch gear and looking very concerned. “Lily,” she says, dumping her broom and uniform onto her trunk. “Snape’s loitering outside the portrait hole and he wants to talk to you.”

“Oh God,” Lily groans.

“Let him suffer,” Dorcas, neatly folding a pile of socks, rolls her eyes.

“I tried to get him to shove off and he threatened to hex me,” Mary says flatly. “Said he’ll sleep there if he has to.” Lily closes her eyes and rubs at her forehead tiredly.

“Let’s just go get Professor McGonagall,” Dorcas’s voice is worried. When Lily opens her eyes her face is worried, creased down the middle with a frown. “She’ll deal with it.”

It is, objectively, the smartest thing to do. It only takes a minute for Lily to decide she won’t do it.

“No,” Lily says, her mind suddenly very clear. “No. I’ll go. If it gets out of hand I’ll go to McGonagall, but I’ll go.”

“Really?” Mary stares at her. Lily nods and stands up, sliding her wand into the pocket of her dressing gown.

Lily heads down the stairs to the common room, feeling a sense of heavy resignation mixed with a frightening clarity. She skirted the edges of this conversation a year ago, has been dodging it ever since. She has to face it, face Snape.

The common room is full of people busy lamenting their exam scores and hunting down lost items. Sirius and Remus are sitting on a couch near the portrait hole; Sirius seems to be busy trying to get Remus to drop a biscuit in his teacup by shouting things at random in his direction, and Remus is effectively dodging Sirius and reading a book propped on his lanky legs at the same time. They glance up as Lily walks towards them, and Sirius gestures towards the hole with one battered leather boot and makes a face.

“Are you sure you want to deal with him, Lily?” Remus lowers his book.

“Yeah, I’ll go thump him if you want,” Sirius adds.

“No, don’t,” Lily says, feeling absurdly fond of them out of nowhere. “I need to talk to him. It’s time.”

“Alright,” Sirius raises an eyebrow. “But we’ll be just inside if he gets out of hand.”

“The thought is appreciated,” Lily says, and Sirius salutes her. And then she braces herself and steps through the portrait hole.

Snape is standing in the hallway looking furious, but he startles when he sees her and stuffs his hands into his pockets.

“Hi,” he says, and he at least has the decency to look somewhat embarrassed.

“What do you want?” Lily asks coldly. She knows this conversation has been a long time coming, but it doesn’t mean she needs to be nice. “You’ve dragged me out of bed at midnight, so it better be good.”

“I want to apologize,” Snape says slowly, looking pained.

“It’s too late for that, Severus.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Save your breath.” Lily wraps her dressing gown more tightly around her and crosses her arms. “I only came out because Mary told me you were threatening to sleep here.”

“I was. I would have done. I never meant to call you Mudblood, it just—“

“Slipped out?” Lily snaps icily. “Like it slipped out last year? It’s too late. I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends—“ Snape blanches when Lily says the name. She’s never said it out loud before. The words, and the way the color drops from Snape’s face, remove any doubt she’s ever had in her mind. She was wrong. Snape is bad. Worse than she could ever have imagined. It hits her like a sock to the gut; the wind is actually knocked out of her for a moment. She was wrong. She was wrong. She finds her voice.“You see—you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?”

Snape stares at her, face white. He opens his mouth but doesn’t seem to be able to form words. Maybe it’s having his actions thrown in his face so blatantly, and maybe it’s the fact that she’s the one doing it. He might have been on her side once, a long, long time ago, but he isn’t now. Lily can’t take it anymore. Lily has to put herself in her own corner,  to stand up, to shove back.

“I can’t pretend anymore,” Lily says decisively. “You’ve chosen your way, I’ve chosen mine.”

“No—listen, I didn’t mean—“

“—to call me Mudblood? But you call everyone of my birth Mudblood, Severus. Why should I be any different?”

Snape struggles to form words, and Lily begins to turn back towards the portrait hole.

“You are different!” Snape blurts out suddenly, and Lily stops. “You are. I have to act like that around them to protect you—“

“Oh, stop it!” Lily shouts. “I’m angry you called me a Mudblood last year, and I’m really angry you did again this morning, but that’s not what the problem really is here and I don’t know why you can’t see that. You could apologize until you’re blue in the face and it wouldn’t mean anything.”

“I don’t—“

“You don’t, do you?” Lily’s felt this anger for years, has always been aware of it and in some respects driven by it. But now it’s rising right to the surface and yes, she had stored up a number of things to say to James Potter the other day but this was so much more, so much worse. “I don’t know how I never saw this before—maybe I am naïve. You really think you’re right. You really think that I’m the exception to some rule, that the rest of us are wrong but I’m not?” Snape just stares at her. “I said this to Mulciber the other day, and I guess the fact that I’m saying it to you means you’re not any different from him,” Lily says quietly. “I’m a Mudblood. I’m not ashamed of it. I want you to know that, Snape, that I’m not. I’m angry because you called me a Mudblood because you felt that’s the worst thing you can say to me, and then felt ashamed of it afterwards. I’m angry because you keep trying to pretend to me you’re not as bad as the rest of them when you want to be a Death Eater too. I’m angry,” Lily takes a deep, shuddering breath, “because you lied to me, Severus, you lied to my face when I asked you if you if you knew anything about Mulciber attacking my friend because you know Mulciber is evil. _Evil._ We were friends, and you lied to me. You’ve been lying for a long time and I’m only just now aware of how much.”

“I’m still your friend, Lily,” Snape whispers.

“No,” Lily says in a very final way. “Friends don’t lie to each other like you lied to me. It’s over, Severus. I don’t want to see you again. And if I hear you’re still hanging around the here, I won’t stop Sirius if he tries to thump you.” She turns and enters the portrait hole for good, leaving Snape standing in the hallway.

Sirius and Remus are still sitting on the couch when Lily walks past them but she doesn’t stop; it’s probably only been five minutes but it feels like much more time has gone by. Mary and Dorcas are both sitting on Dorcas’s bed when Lily comes back into the room, and most of Dorcas’s socks are folded.

“Did you hex him?” Mary asks, and Lily shakes her head and sits down next to them.

“I talked to him,” she says. “Which went—well—as expected, I guess.”

“Hm,” Mary grunts, and Dorcas shoots her a look.

“Are you okay?” Dorcas drapes an arm around Lily’s shoulders.

“I—“ Lily says, “No. Not really. I’m trying—I’m trying to figure out where it all went so wrong, and—“ she takes a breath and finds her voice is shaky, “—why it took me so long to see it, you know? I really fucked up there, I really did.”

“Lily,” Dorcas’s arm tightens. “I’m so sorry—it’s not your fault Snape’s horrible.”

“I’ve been ignoring it for years,” Lily says desperately.

“It’s hard to see shit like that in people you care about,” Mary says. “I get it. Nobody wants to think their friends are bad people.”

“I know, I know, I’m frustrated but I know,” Lily falters. How she feels, everything the last two weeks have revealed is something much bigger and much more final that simply being wrong. She isn’t great at being wrong but she can deal with it. This is more. She doesn’t know how to put it into words but she desperately needs for them to understand. “I just feel—I feel like I don’t know what direction is up anymore, do you have any idea what I mean?” Mary and Dorcas look at her, one pair of brown eyes and one blue and both very serious, and she knows that she does.

“Yeah,” Mary says quietly. “I’ve got some idea.”

“Two weeks ago, I had everything figured out,” Lily says. “I had things that I knew to be true because they had been for years. Snape was a good person who was just misguided, and James Potter was a class A selfish idiot who doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and my biggest worries were passing exams and Petunia’s wedding and making a final decision about whether I want to pursue Healing as a career, and Hogwarts was safe, and there were big things happening out there but they couldn’t touch us here, and none of that was true, was it?“ She grabs at Mary’s hands, which are cold, and Dorcas grabs at hers, and they tangle their fingers together in a big jumble. Lily’s eyes are wet; she’s started crying quite without realizing it, something else she’s been holding inside for weeks. Neither Mary or Dorcas say anything, though Mary’s face is suddenly very tight and Dorcas’s eyes are watery too. They let Lily talk for them.

“None of them are true, everything I thought I knew is wrong and I don’t know where to stand or how to make sense of it,” Lily continues. “Because what’s happening out there is dangerous, and it’s real, it’s not some far-away thing that Aurors far across the country are dealing with. It’s people we know. It’s Snape. It’s our friends and our classmates, it’s us. Nowhere is safe, not even here. Not anymore. And all that other stuff—my grades and my sister and, God, even my future, they don’t matter as much because I’m in danger just by being here.” Tears are running down Lily’s face now and dripping off her chin and into her pajamas.

“I feel like we’re all waiting on the edge of a cliff,” Lily says very quietly, “just looking down over the side and seeing nothing down there but darkness and knowing we’re going to fall off it with no way to stop. Knowing something worse is coming. That’s what I feel like.”

“I’m scared,” Mary says suddenly, and her voice is uncharacteristically quiet. “I’m not used to feeling like this. That piece of shit did this to me and I am—I’m scared of them.”

“Me too,” Dorcas sniffs. And she surprises both of them by adding, “but I’m angry, too.” Dorcas is soft-spoken and gentle and avoids conflict. And right now her eyes, even though they’re red and puffy and mascara is smudged under them, are hard and scared and determined. “I don’t know what we can do about it,” she says. “I don’t know if anything can be done. But I want to.”

“Me too,” Mary’s eyes are suddenly blazing.

“Yeah,” Lily says. “Me too.” Her heart is hammering very hard but she feels clear-headed and bright—not better exactly, not happy, but focused, supported, loved.

“As for Potter, I think you’re going to just have to suck it up and admit that maybe you didn’t have the whole picture,” Mary says abruptly, changing the subject to all of their relief.

“God,” Lily wipes at her face, which is very damp. “That’s the worst bit of all of this, that apparently against all odds James Potter actually has a heart and everyone knew it but me.”

“Everyone’s allowed to have a blind spot,” Dorcas nudges Lily with her elbow, and Lily blanches.

“That is not what—Jesus! That’s not what this is. I’m willing to say maybe I’ve been a bit wrong about him and I’m going to consider apologizing. That’s all. I’m not signing up to have any baby Potters any time soon.”

“Whatever you say,” Dorcas winks absurdly, and Mary makes a gagging sound. Lily smacks at them and then gets her arms around both of them and they hug, holding on to each other as hard as they can like they really are staring over the edge of a precipice with no idea how to stop.


	17. Friday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to chloe gaydiators for looking over this chapter for me xx

“Can you believe this is the second to last time we’ll be taking this train back home?”

Dorcas says this to Lily through a mouthful of eggs the next morning at breakfast, and Lily pulls a face as she pours herself some tea.

“I’m trying not to think about it, honestly,” she says, stirring in sugar.

“Don’t be morbid,” Mary says cheerfully. “Summer is so close I can taste it.”

The three of them are in a surprisingly good mood this morning and seem to have unanimously decided not to dwell too deeply on what was said the night before. It’s a truly beautiful, almost picturesque day, the kind that Lily pictures when she thinks about Hogwarts. Breakfast is particularly extravagant and delicious and Lily’s plate is piled with pancakes and sausages and she feels lighter than she has in a long time. The previous night had been cathartic. She had passed Snape in the hallway on the way to breakfast and brushed past him, and hadn’t felt bad about it at all.

She isn’t quite done packing and she’s elected to try and not worry about it too much. Four hours is four hours. Anything can happen in four hours. Lily’s trunk can get packed in four hours. Maybe.

“Does it taste like tequila and sunshine?” Sirius appears out of nowhere to sit down across from Dorcas, James right behind him. James looks her way and coughs.

“And sunburns and very long nights and breaking boys’ hearts,” Mary agrees cheerfully. “Where are the rest of your lot?”

“Still asleep,” James starts piling toast onto his plate, and butter on his toast. “We learnt long ago it’s best to let Remus sleep.”

“Try and rouse him by unnatural means and he turns into a monster,” Sirius says, and sniggers. Lily shoots him a dirty look and opens her copy of the Daily Prophet. There isn’t much in it.

“Another debate on whether or not the Hogwarts train is the most effective method of communication,” she says, “and cauldron prices have risen again.”

“Look at page five,” James suggests, still not really meeting her eyes. “That’s where they publish things they know they need to publish but they don’t want people to see.” Lily obliges, flipping the paper open a few more pages. The fifth page has a row of comics and an editorial about a recently passed American law, and one small article in the corner that catches Lily’s eye.

It’s barely more than two paragraphs and all it says is that there has been an attack on two Muggle families by wanted criminal Fenrir Greyback, that the parents in both families were brutally torn to shreds, and that the children are missing.

“This is horrible,” Lily says. Dorcas, leaning over her shoulder, nods.

“What? Can I see it?” James asks suddenly.

“Get your own bloody paper,” Sirius says with a mouthful of toast.

“It’s Remus’s and he’s not up yet!”

Sure,” Lily passes the Prophet over to him and he unfolds it, and both he and Sirius vanish behind it to read.

“So my parents have agreed to take us to Italy in July,” Mary says cheerfully. “I forgot about it, I found out last night!”

“Oh I’m jealous,” Dorcas says wistfully. “I’m not going anywhere—morning Peter, morning Remus!”

“Morning,” Peter sits down next to Dorcas and grins at the breakfast. “Beautiful day isn’t it?” Remus waves a little blearily and yawns.

“What are you two gawking at? Did you steal someone’s paper? Mine came upstairs but I haven’t read it yet,” he says.

“Nothing,” James and Sirius’s heads pop up from behind the paper in unison. Remus’s eyes narrow.

“What is it?” he says.

“Nothing!”

“Prongs, hand it over, it’s too early for this.”

“Really, it’s all rubbish anyway, I doubt you even want to—“

“James—“ Remus makes a grab for the paper and James struggles away, trying to fold it as he goes. Remus manages to get his arm around James’s middle as James tries to stuff it under Sirius’s backside; Sirius, misunderstanding, seizes it and holds it up high. The pumpkin juice on the table wobbles precariously, and so does the canteen of syrup.

“Oh for God’s—“ Lily snatches it out of Sirius’s hand before they can topple the entire table, and passes it to Remus who flips it to page five. James and Sirius both seem to hold their breath; there’s something significant here but Lily doesn’t understand what it is. Remus’s eyes flicker down the page and stop. They follow the lines of the story at the bottom several times and he swallows very visibly.

“Well,” he says, folding the paper up slowly. His movements are suddenly very small, almost mechanical. “That’s something isn’t it.”

“Remus—“ James starts, and then stops. There is something on Remus’s face that Lily hasn’t ever seen before on anyone’s. Every muscle seems to be tightening but he’s standing perfectly still. He sets the paper down on the table.

“I believe I forgot something upstairs,” he says stiffly, and he turns and walks away from the table towards the entrance.

“Oh fuck,” Sirius stands so fast he smacks his knee on the underside of the table, and races to follow him. This had happened in reverse not long ago, Lily remembers, Sirius leaving the table and Remus hurrying to see what was the matter.

“Bloody hell,” James drops his head into his hands. Peter, meanwhile, has recovered the paper and read it, and sighs very heavily.

“This isn’t good at all,” he says, looking very worried.

“I don’t understand, what—“ Lily starts, but James suddenly leans across the table towards her, one hand landing on her shoulder to steady himself.

“Do you know who the man in the article is? Fenrir Greyback?" he hisses into Lily’s ear, close enough that Dorcas and Mary can’t hear him. His breath tickles the back of Lily’s neck and gusts down the collar of her shirt.

“He’s a criminal right? He attacks kids,” she whispers back. She’s heard the name once or twice followed by very dark rumors but little actual truth. She could probably remember more if James’s hand wasn’t so warm on her shoulder, or his hair brushing against her cheek.

“He’s a werewolf who attacks kids,” James mutters.

“How on earth do you—oh my God—“ Lily pulls back to look James in the face. It’s deadly serious. “Greyback did—he was the one who—“

James nods tightly, and sits down.

“Oh my God—“ Lily feels like she could throw up. “Oh, Remus. I should—I should go see if he’s alright—“

“I, er, I wouldn’t if I were you,” Peter says quickly, and Lily glares at him. He shuts his mouth very quickly.

“Pete’s right, I probably—“

“Shut up, Potter,” Lily says, and she gets up from the table. Behind her she hears Mary say, “Wait, what just happened?”

The hallway outside the Great Hall is empty and so is the next, but Lily hears voices coming from a smaller corridor to her left so she turns down it. There is a small spare classroom at the end of it and the door is slightly ajar; Lily can hear footsteps and Sirius’s voice within. She’s about to go knock on the open door when something in the tone of Sirius’s voice makes her pause and stop outside it instead.

“—stupid, I know it is, it just came out of nowhere you know? That wasn’t exactly what I expected to read in the paper this morning—“ Remus’s voice is usually so dry and sardonic and it’s not. It’s tight and, if Lily had to guess, panicked.

“I know right,” Sirius says heavily. “Fuckers hid it too, knowing it’d scare people if they put it on the front page. You know we weren’t trying to hide it from you, right? We just wanted to, I don’t know, make sure it didn’t jump up in your face.”

Lily slides herself to the wall to her left; in the crack between the wall and the door she can see them. Sirius is sitting on a bench and Remus is pacing up and down the small room’s length, his hands in his hair.

“It’s like a bad dream, you know, like one you have when you’re little except I didn’t dream about him when I was little because I didn’t know who he was,” Remus paces and paces. “I’ve been dreading this since he escaped from prison last year Pads, I’ve been imagining it in my head and it always starts like this—“

“Moony,” Sirius says, and his voice is very gentle. “If he would—I mean if he’d try-- there’s no way he’d ever make it within ten miles of Hogwarts. This is the safest place you could possibly be.”

“I’m not worried about me!” Remus says, and his voice is suddenly loud and frantic. He whirls to look at Sirius and from what Lily can see of his face it’s terrifying, and terrified. “I’m not worried at me at all,” Remus continues. “What if he decides that what he did to me wasn’t enough and he comes after my family, after my mom? What if he—I don’t know—if he finds out I’m in school and he comes for Peter and James? Or you?”

Sirius’s face is illuminated brightly from the light outside and it’s very still. He says nothing.

“That’s what I’m scared of, Sirius,” Remus’s voice drops. “I’m not scared for me. He’s already done the very worst thing he can do to me. There isn’t anything worse he can do. Except hurt you. Except do this to you,” Remus has his back turned to her but he seems to have gestured towards his own chest. “He could make you into this. You, or James, or Peter, or my mom. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

There is a long silence. “I know,” Sirius says finally. Remus lets out a heavy breath.

“I know Fenrir Greyback isn’t hiding under my bed,” he says, and his voice is quite unsteady. “I know I’m not going to drive into town when I’m home and see him in the pub. But that’s how it feels. They all could be anywhere, Death Eaters, and him most of all.”

“It’d be his undoing if he came after me,” Sirius says with surprising brightness. “My mum’d kill him.”

“That isn’t funny,” Remus says sharply. “And anyway, you’re disowned.”

“I still think my mum’d kill him. For ruining the Black bloodline, or something. I’m a disgrace but I still have the potential to produce future Black offspring you know.”

“Merlin help me that you never do,” Remus sighs.

“Rude. I’d have beautiful children. I have great genes.”

“I somehow think even your mum would be outmatched by Fenrir Greyback.” Remus takes a few steps towards Sirius, and his voice already sounds lighter.

“Have you seen her when she’s really going? No you have not. You’ve seen her in a tiff, yes, but she’s a force of nature when she’s really got steam under her engine. The cage match of the century. Walburga Black and Fenrir Greyback. It’d solve all our problems.”

Remus takes another step towards Sirius and turns slightly. His face is outlined in profile. “You’re mad,” he says and suddenly he’s laughing. “You’re ridiculous and you’re completely round the bend, do you know that?”

“Runs in the family,” Sirius shrugs. Then he grins, and it’s a rather wicked grin. “But you like it.”

“You’re disgusting,” Remus says, and Sirius stands up and his hands are on Remus’s hands, and then his shoulders, then in his hair, and then it clicks and Lily knows who Sirius Black is dating.

Remus laughs a little and they both smile and then they’re kissing in the sunlight streaming through the window. It’s slow but not hesitant or cautious; they have done this before, they’ve done this many times. It’s soft and thorough. Lily hasn’t been kissed like that in a long time. Maybe never. Lily wants to be kissed like that.

Remus’s fingers lace through Sirius’s fingers, and Lily suddenly feels voyeuristic, not because she’s seeing something she shouldn’t see or doesn’t understand but because they look sun-drenched and happy in a way that suggests nothing else matters in that moment. She slides away from the wall as quietly as she can, rearranging a few of her thoughts on Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. It isn’t difficult. They seem right together. They seem like they fit.

 Lily smiles a little, and turns down the hallway to walk back towards the Great Hall and the rest of her breakfast.


	18. Friday, Still

The train leaves a few hours later and somehow Lily and all her belongings are on it. Dorcas and Mary and trunks too. They don’t do much talking as it pulls away from the Hogsmede station, and Lily watches the countryside go by as Dorcas and Mary play Exploding Snap for most of the afternoon.

They disembark in no great hurry; Lily feels suddenly like she wants to linger in the compartment to imprint it in her mind and her dad won’t be here for a while anyway. But they step out into afternoon sunshine and the crowded platform. Children are swept up in hugs and carts nearly collide and owls squawk and parents shout excitedly. Lily hauls her trunk down the steps and onto the platform, gives Mary and Dorcas both a minute to greet their parents before meeting them again.

“Well,” Dorcas says, and her eyes convey that she doesn’t really know how to say what she’s thinking, which is how Lily feels too. “Good luck at Petunia’s wedding, Lily. I’ll write, of course, and let’s go to Diagon Alley together before the year begins alright?”

“She’ll write and I’ll phone you,” Mary says. “And I’ll mail you something from Italy if you promise to get drunk and puke down the front of Vernon’s shoes.”

“I’ll consider it,” Lily laughs, and they hug each other long and hard. Dorcas breaks free first as mother calls her name.

“You going to be okay, with Snape and everything?” Mary asks, and Lily shrugs.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Yes. Maybe.”

“That’s how I feel,” Mary says. “Maybe it will in time.”

Lily hugs her, and waves her off, and then looks around for Sirius. He’s walking through the crowd on the platform with Peter, who stops and turns and is tackled by three blonde-haired little girls. He turns away to hug them back, and Lily manages to catch Sirius’s eye.

Sirius is wearing Muggle clothes, jeans and a black t-shirt and his Doc Martens, and he trots over to her and grins, “Oy, Evans—“ he starts, but then stops when someone behind him calls out his name. “Oh, hold on—“

Lily glances over his shoulder to see a collection of people waving at them and pushing through the crowd towards them. Lily can only assume they’re James’s parents. The man is indisputably his father; he’s tall and lanky and has untidy black hair that’s thinning a little on the top, and has James’s nose and unruly eyebrows. He looks more like a university professor than an esteemed Auror. There are two women with him, and before Lily can get a good look at either of them Sirius is swept up in an enormous hug. He flails rather helplessly then hugs the woman who must be James’s mother, who comes up to just above his elbow.

“Oh, look at you!” She shouts, and Lily snorts quietly into her hand because Sirius’s hair is ruffled and his face rather red, and he looks really happy. “You’ve grown a meter! You haven’t cut your hair all year, have you?”

“Obviously not, Mrs. Potter,” Sirius scoffs good-naturedly. “It looks great how it is.”

“Please tell me my son hasn’t grown his out,” James’s mother says, “Speaking of, where is he? And Remus too?”

“Still on the train,” Sirius says. “James dropped a pot of ink, made a bit of a mess.”

“Of course, I should have expected as much,” James’s mother lets Sirius go, and his father claps Sirius on the back. Lily knows James’s mother is distantly related to Sirius’s family and so expected her to look more like Andromeda Black or Sirius himself. She does in that she has very dark hair and beautiful features, but her eyes are lighter and sparkling, her cheeks have the blush of someone who spends a fair amount of time outside and she has strong arms and shoulders. She looks kind and warm and slightly mischievous.

“Oh, sorry—“ Sirius steps back. “Mr. and Mrs. Potter, this is Lily Evans—she was Prefect with Remus you know, and she’s Head Girl.”

Something twinkles in Mr. Potter’s eyes, and he reaches forward to shake Lily’s hand. “Very nice to meet you Miss Evans, and congratulations, that’s very exciting.”

“Good luck,” Mrs. Potter winks. “I’ll apologize in advance but you look more than capable. Never would I ever have thought—we’re proud of course, terribly proud, but usually the letters that come home say he’s broken into the Potion’s cabinet again, not that he’s Head Boy. Merlin’s beard! It really ought to be Remus, I’ve said this already Hope and I’ll say it again—“

“I think James will do just fine, and Remus will be glad to not have to do it,” the other woman standing behind the Potters says. “Hope Lupin, it’s nice to meet you Lily. I’ve heard quite a bit about you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Lily shakes Remus’s mum’s hand. Hope Lupin looks like a supermodel; tall and slender with long brown hair tied back out of her face and warm green eyes. She doesn’t have Remus’s nose.

“Lily and I need to have a word, we’ll be just a moment,” Sirius says, and he takes Lily’s arm and they turn away. “Sorry about that,” he says, looking a little pink in the face. “They’re great, James’s family is. Just loud and very, you know, huggy.”

“They seem nice,” Lily says. “Not at all what I expected, though.”

“Thought they’d be much more impressive and imposing?” Sirius laughs. “James’s dad can be when he’s mad, let me tell you. Anyway, Evans. I believe you owe me some money!”

“You think wrong,” Lily puts her hands on her hips. “It’s the other way around, Black.”

“Oh, posh,” Sirius raises a cocky eyebrow. “You’ve got no idea. You can just admit it and pay up and we can forget the whole thing.”

“I do have an idea,” Lily says. “I know who it is.”

“It isn’t Marlene McKinnon,” Sirius’s eyebrow creeps a little higher. “Just to clarify.”

“I know it’s not Marlene, because I know Marlene would never date you,” Lily snorts. “But I do know who.”

“You do not, you’re bluffing to get ten galleons!”

“I saw you this morning,” Lily says, and Sirius blanches and his eyebrow drops. “I followed you both out of the Great Hall because I thought to, I don’t know, make sure everything was alright because of the newspaper article, and I saw.”

“Oh,” Sirius fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette and drops it before he can properly get it out. “Um. Wasn’t really expecting you to figure it out, to be honest. Um. Did you--”

“Don’t worry,” Lily says quickly. “I didn’t tell anyone, not Mary or Dorcas or anyone. It’s between us. And don’t smoke that here.” She crushes the cigarette under her heel, and Sirius glowers.

“Thanks,” he says shortly. “People are pretty—you know—they’re not exactly kind most of the time. And it’s not exactly easy—you know.”

“Yeah,” Lily says. “I know.”

“You would,” Sirius looks up and grins at her. It’s quite a different grin from his usual, which is cocky and devil-may-care and obviously purposeful. It’s rather sweet. “But thanks.”

“Look, Sirius,” Lily says, “we can call the bet off. It’s pretty unimportant with everything else that’s happened, so we can forget about it if you want.”

“No!” Sirius looks offended. “You won fair and square. I’m a man of my word, Evans.” He fishes in his pocket and tosses her a shiny ten galleon piece. Lily sighs and pockets it.

“I feel like a bit of a hypocrite,” Sirius says quietly, turning to look across the platform. Remus and James are coming out of the train at last. James’s trunk is ink-splattered and he looks annoyed, and Remus is laughing. His hair is catching the light and he’s grinning and he looks so carefree and happy.  He doesn’t usually look that way. “I mean I made fun of James for years. But I’m all messed up over him. Don’t think it’ll happen to you until it does.” He sighs, but he looks happy. Lily feels a weird twinge in her stomach.

 “Yeah,” she says, watching Remus and James reach their families; James’s mother gives him an even more aggressive hug than she gave Sirius, and he squirms as she ruffles his hair. Remus is taller than his mother too, and he hugs her hard and doesn’t squirm away. Lily suddenly really misses her dad, can’t wait for him to get there. Misses her mother too.

James has wrestled his way out of his mother’s grip and is hugging his dad, and Lily is suddenly aware she’s staring a bit, and that Sirius is staring at her.

“You can talk to him, you know,” Sirius says, and before Lily can say anything, he turns away from her and shouts. “Oy, Potter! Come over here and get your stupid Wimbourne Wasp socks you left behind!”

James, frowning, turns and walks over to them. “I don’t have any Wimbourne—oh, er, hi Evans. I do not have Wimbourne Wasp socks, by the way, thank you Pads.”

“Right, just the pants with little wasps on them,” Sirius snorts and turns away. “Ta, Evans. Have a good summer, alright?” He walks back over to Remus and waves at Lily over his shoulder, and she reigns in the urge to flip him off only because James’s mother seems so nice.

“Er,” James glances at her and runs a hand through his hair and looks very uncomfortable. “Hi.”

“Hi. Right.” Lily takes a very deep breath and makes up her mind. It’s one of the easiest decisions she’s made all week.

“Potter, I need to talk to you—“ she says, right at the same moment that James blurts “Evans, I’ve got something to tell you!”

“Er—“ she says.

“Sorry, go ahead.”

“Right, sorry. I need to, I mean,” Lily’s heart is beating stupidly fast in her ribcage and along her temple, which is stupid, because this is James Potter, and she had know him for years. She steels herself, and looks square into James’s eyes, which are very warm and brown behind his stupid chunky lenses. “I can’t let us both head off for the summer with things they way they are,” she says. “Without trying to explain myself. I feel really, really bad about—“

“Wait, wait, wait,” James interrupts her. “No, stop—“

“Potter!” Lily snaps. “I am trying to apologize to you! It’s not exactly easy for me! Will you shut it and let me finish?”

James shuts it.

“Thank you,” Lily clears her throat, abundantly thankful that there is nobody else around. “I just wanted to say that what I said to you was really out of line, and I’m sorry.”

The words hang in the air for a long moment as James considers her. “You shouldn’t be,” he says finally. “I mean, you were right.”

“I’ve just been feeling—I—what?”

James shrugs his left shoulder and twists the left corner of his mouth. “You were right. Everything you said was right. I can be an idiot, and I can be pretty self centered and sometimes I can be a bit of a bully, and most of the time I act that way because Sirius’ll think it’s funny.”

Lily stares at him, and he stares uncomfortably back. “No,” she says. “What I said to you was… awful. It was awful. I’ve been feeling so horrible about it, going over and over in my mind how I can make it right. I shouldn’t have said it at all, you didn’t deserve that.”

“Well,” James says, smiling a little. “I’m not going to deny that you maybe could have approached it in a slightly more tactful manner,” Lily flushes. ” But you shouldn’t apologize to me for being honest. So few people are.” He looks tired, and a little sad, and a little relieved all at the same time.

“No, you’re not a jerk,” Lily objects. “I mean maybe sometimes, but who isn’t sometimes? I’m a jerk sometimes. But you’re not when it counts.”

James bursts out laughing suddenly, which startles Lily, a huge belly laugh. Lily isn’t sure if she’s ever properly made him laugh like that before. “I’m sorry,” he gasps, “Bloody hell, I’m sorry, just this argument usually goes the other way around doesn’t it?”

“The irony of the situation is not lost on me,” Lily says wryly, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it. I feel terrible about it. And you were so angry with me—so don’t tell me that it wasn’t uncalled for!”

“I was, yeah. It’s not exactly easy to have your flaws dissected and then yelled at you in front of half the school by the prettiest girl in it.” James lets go of his trunk, which stands up on his own, looking a little sheepish.

“Potter,” Lily sighs.

“Sorry, couldn’t resist. I guess it just needed a little time to sink in, you know. Think about it.”

“Sirius calls you a jerk every day practically. You’re saying he’s not being honest with you?”

 “Oh, Sirius doesn’t count. He’s a jerk too, after all. He could call me that every five minutes and it wouldn’t mean anything. I guess I had to hear it from someone who matters.”

“Someone who matters,” Lily echoes. James uncrosses his arms and then crosses them again, looking at his sneakers.

“Is that okay?” he asks. Lily has never heard him be hesitant before.

“Yeah,” she says, because it is. “I will still maintain I didn’t need to bellow at you in front of the whole house, though.”

“Maybe next time you feel the urge to point out my character flaws, do it in a slightly more private setting, yeah?”

Lily grins because James is grinning. When he grins, really grins, his eyebrows made him look like he is up to something.

“Well, I’m sorry for shouting at you in front of our peers,” Lily says. 

“I’m sorry I drove you to it,” James says.

They smile at each other for a minute. Lily is uncomfortably aware of how silly they probably look, then decides she doesn’t care.

“You were right anyway,” she says, because she felt better after getting her words out in the open, and this is another confession that had been eating away at her. “About Snape. You were right from the start. I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.”

“Maybe you’re a bit more understanding of people than I am,” James says. “And I will not say I told you so, but—“

“I guess I am naïve, sometimes,” Lily says quietly.

“And I’m a jerk, sometimes,” James says. “So I think I can accept that.”

“You’re not being a jerk now.”

There is another long pause, the kind of pause that makes Lily feel like maybe she should be saying something. James’s fingers, which end in square, neatly trimmed nails, wiggle on his crossed arms. He isn’t wearing cologne, but he smells good, like soap and summer air.

“So you know,” James says suddenly. He’s obviously trying to keep his voice light but he still sounds like he’s being strangled. “The day you made this bet with Sirius you also said you’d maybe go to Hogsmeade with me if I became Head Boy.”

“Did I,” Lily says, and tries not to smile.

“If I recall correctly—and I’m pretty sure I do.”

“I guess I remember something like that,” Lily says.

“And now I’m Head Boy, so are you going to rescind that statement or what?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Lily says, pulling the coins she got from Sirius out of her pocket. She feels lighter than air, and positively silly and she isn’t sure why. “You can bet on it. That’s what started all this trouble in the first place, wasn’t it?”

“You want me to bet on it? On whether or not you were joking?” James raises an eyebrow. “You feeling alright Evans?”

“I feel great. Go on.” This doesn’t really make sense, but Lily’s started this line of thought and she’s pretty much stuck with it now. The worst she can do is make a fool of herself in front of James Potter, and that’s something she’s already done once today. “Give it a guess. If I was joking, that sucks for you but you get five galleons.  If I wasn’t, I get the money.” She holds out her left hand and the galleons wink in the sunlight.

“Er,” James frowns at the money in her hand for a minute. “Alright, fine. Hold on.” He peers at her face and at the money and then apprehensively starts to reach for it. Lily grins and snatches her hand back before he can grab it, and then she turns and strides back towards her trunk without waiting to see his reaction. Her heart is a jackhammer inside her chest. She gets halfway across the platform before James’s mouth seems to catch up with what happened.

“What?” James says behind her, then, “WAIT! EVANS WAIT, HOLD ON!”

Lily stops and glances back over her shoulder at him. He seems to have figured out she was teasing him, and his face is shining with understanding and sudden clear determination. He also looks like he’s about to faint.

“What?” Lily says.

“Do you want to go to Hogsmeade with me the first weekend back next fall?” James blurts. Lily turns the rest of the way around and looks at him.

“Like a date?” She asks.

“Doesn’t have to be,” James says quickly. “If you don’t want. I do, though. Want it to be. A date. Merlin. Lily, will you go on a date with me?”

Lily has known him for years, James and his stupid glasses and his big belly laugh and his lanky elbows and his bad jokes. She has always been certain that he will always be there, with a wink and a bad line, wanting her because he can’t have her. She has always known she’ll turn round a corner, or walk out onto the lawn and there he is, with his friends and his Quidditch and his pranks and his unending enthusiasm and his unruly hair.

She had always been sure, until she hadn’t at all. He had been comforting, a slightly annoying ever-present shadow in her life that she had taken had a moment to think twice about, until one day that hadn’t been the case. She had never doubted his existence, up until the very moment when she started doubting everything.

And that’s the thing, isn’t? Things are changing. The world is darker. None of them are safe, not really, not even James Potter, who is wearing a very ugly pair of shorts and has neat, coiled muscles in his arms and who cares about her, and who will do anything for the people he cares about. He seems to be holding his breath and he looks nervous, and even a little sweet.

Lily stretches her arms out to feel the sun on them and even though she knows she has to go home and confront her sister, that her last year will come before she is ready for it, that her ex-best friend betrayed her and the world is getting darker every day, she laughs. Warm summer sunshine is drenching the platform and there is a breeze in her hair. Peter Pettigrew is lifting up a little girl with a blonde mop of hair, who throws her arms around him. Across the platform, Sirius and Remus appear from behind a corner; the top three buttons on Remus’s shirt are unbuttoned, Sirius’s hair is mussed and they both have the flustered, self-satisfied look of someone who has been thoroughly snogged. Steam billows from the train, bright red in the sun, and around her kids greet their parents and jabber excitedly and James Potter is wearing ugly shorts and holding his breath.

“Oh all right,” Lily calls to him and, grinning, turns towards the barrier to the Muggle world, and her father, and home.

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so that's it, that's the end! thank you all so so so much for reading this silly fic that somehow exploded into 18 chapters that mostly ignore canon, i see all your kudos and comments and i can't express how much i appreciate them. 
> 
> ALSO, big big thanks to chloe gaydiators for looking over the last two chapters, so much appreciated.


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